Cook, Serve, Delicious! (CSD) is a fast-paced, easy-to-learn, yet difficult-to-master cooking game that starts with you running a struggling café, and turning it into a 5-star Gordon Ramsay restaurant. What begins as a quiet grind soon escalates into a chaotic rush, with customers either loving your dishes—or chasing you for refunds. It's hard to say which.

• Game incentivises you to try different dish combinations
• Simplicity at its finest, but difficult to master
• An addictive gameplay loop
• Gives you some degree of control over the difficulty of each day, high risk, high reward

• Late game rewards don’t feel like they’re enough

At the start of each day you’ll be able to prepare for the following service which involves choosing dishes to put on the menu, purchase new equipment to unlock more dishes, upgrade previous dishes and so on. Some dishes are crowd-pleasers (Known as Boosters), but paired with other foods might put them off your restaurant entirely (Known as Deterrents). These factor into your Buzz, a rating that determines customer flow, for that day. The higher the Buzz, the more customers, the more (potential) income, the more likely you’ll find yourself overwhelmed with orders, or, how we say it in the industry, you’ll be in the sh*t.

There are many factors that determine your Buzz aside from the dishes themselves. Menu Rot is another mechanic that reduces your buzz if you have the same item on the menu for two consecutive days, and gets worse the longer you have it on the menu for. This practically forces the player to choose new combinations of dishes and not stick with what you’re used to. Events such as the health inspector visiting can affect your buzz rating, as well as sending out a lot of bad orders in a single day. It’s almost like a balancing act, but it also serves as a way to limit the difficulty. There’s nothing stopping you from purposely reducing the Buzz because the game is getting too overwhelming, just means you won’t have as much money coming in.

The meat and gravy of CSD is during service, and whilst the game holds your hand and keeps things slow for a while, it doesn’t take long for things to ramp up in difficulty. Rush hour happens twice every day which brings in more customers. What makes this game so immensely addictive is the simplicity of each dish only needing a few taps on your keyboard. At first, it will be a lot of looking to see what button is for what ingredient, but once you start getting into the whisk of things, every order feels like it flows so fluently and almost rhythmically. It doesn’t needlessly complicate each dish’s mechanics to add difficulty, there are other factors like additional prep stations, and customers being less patient to account for that. The customers also rate your food with either perfect, average, or bad. The game encourages you to perform perfect orders as much as possible by giving you additional buzz the next day, and giving you some extra money if you get a perfect day with no average or bad orders.

Besides the obvious orders you’ll have to cook during service, there are also chores that need to be done during the day. Washing the dishes, taking out the rubbish, cleaning the toilet (yes, you’re doing this during service, don’t question it, just let it happen) and so on. These are just as easy as the orders themselves, but are time-consuming, especially if you’re in rush hour with impatient customers who can’t clearly see you’re scrambling around the place like an overcooked egg.

As you progress through the game, you’ll gain stars for your run-down establishment that makes things harder. The difficulty curve only takes flight at around three stars, but before that point, you are almost led into a false sense of confidence. You’ll achieve perfect days a lot, know most of your dishes inside and out, and will accept nothing less than pure perfection every single day. However, just like the arthritis you feel in your wrist with every tap on your keyboard, you have to accept that you can’t win them all… Maybe it was just me trying to squeeze every last bit of buzz I could throughout the entire game, but things certainly did ramp up significantly when achieving three stars. More customers visit, more prep stations will be added, customers become less patient, and the more in the sh*t you will be on any given day. The difficulty curve does creep up on you, and you’ll find yourself thinking that you’re in rush hour for the entire day. But, as previously mentioned, you don’t have to go full on all the time, purposely reducing your buzz is a viable strategy if the sheer amount of customers ordering food is overwhelming you.

That being said, the rewards for achieving perfect days and winning Crazy Dave’s bets feel less compelling the more you progress through the game. The lack of scaling to the pitiful $250 makes it not only less encouraging to achieve perfect days, but almost meaningless when you can make that much money and more if you increase your buzz slightly with much less difficulty. The Crazy Dave’s bets suffer from a lack of scaling as well, but also loop once you’ve received all the bets. You’ll receive the same bet that you were offered when you were a zero-star nobody to the now five-star somebody. I just feel like there could’ve been more done with this mechanic.

CSD is a brilliantly crafted game, embracing the simplicity and addictive gameplay to serve you up a truly satisfying experience. Its adjustable difficulty caters to both hardcore fans and casual players, offering a joy that no other real-life kitchens could match. Whether you’re a seasoned chef or a cooking novice, this game will leave you hungry for more.

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1st installment of my fav stressful de-stress game series that i always come back to, a classic must try esp. on sale.
(we do not talk about Forever)

Its Fun.