Recent reviews by The Dokta

Bigger numbers!
BIGGER!
EVEN BIGGER!
MAKE THE NUMBERS BIGGER!!!

Yeah, the art is gorgeous and the gameplay is fun and every match feels fresh

But most importantly of all, it feels great to drop 22 dice on an opponent and hear them go clickety-clack before you absolutely annihilate them.

Amazingly chill sandbox.

Also, you can pet the sheep.

After all the Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook posts talking about how great an Animal Crossing crime drama would be, someone actually went and made one.

Charming and clever - would love to see them make more.

Boy it sure is nice to have a critically acclaimed, commercially successful and universally loved piece of creative media.

I sure hope the team that made it get some kind of bonus payout or at least get to stay employed aaand Microsoft fired them.

All items and upgrades purchased, all currencies but one are maxed out. There's basically no personal benefit to playing.

But I'm still diving for managed democracy.

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Edit: Compulsory PSN account or lose access to the game huh?

Welp, it was nice while it lasted. I'm checking out.

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Edit #2: We're back in business.

It's truly amazing what a community Arrowhead has managed to create with this game.

Almost as if the entire player base has been encouraged to coordinate and cooperate to achieve collective goals.

Stopped playing in 2017 after a hectic binge

Came back in 2023 and it's just as good as I remember

I don't even care that age and lack of practice has made me terrible at it, it just feels too good to play

Update: Having made it to the final boss, I need to change my opinion. Cuisineer is NOT a cute cooking game where you dungeon-crawl for ingredients. It's an isometric hack-and-slash with a pretty vestigial cooking minigame attached.

The second-last challenge is a frustrating but also easily exploitable mix of cooking and harvesting, but the FINAL challenge is just a boss rush and I cannot be bothered rerolling and grinding mats to re-level a set of boss killing gear to replace my dungeon farming gear.

The last fight is pretty nakedly aping Hades which is a shame because the designers have included none of the story impact or a satisfying power curve.

Reluctant thumbs down

---Original Review---

I like this game. I do like it. But there are a lot of rough edges and weird design decisions that prevent me from loving it.

Let's get the parts I like out of the way: The art is gorgeous and the character designs are wonderful. The visuals are what made this an instant-wishlist item when I saw it at PAX AUS. The general premise and world are also adorable and make for a very approachable, comfortable setting. The music easygoing and even the boss themes have a kind of ball-pit playroom quality to them.

The game is broken into roughly three parts: Dungeon crawling for ingredients, running the restaurant and downtime.

Dungeon crawling feels good at first, and the scenery is easy on the eyes. Every dungeon is a semi-randomly assembled series of square cell templates that always have the same enemies and layouts, which is good for gaining a sense of mastery of your environment but can get old quickly if there's not a whole lot of variety.

The real pain is that there's very little scope to power up, so enemies that are spongy and frustrating at the start of the game are just as spongy and frustrating in the late game. I'll cover the upgrade system below, but the bottom line is that having to fight a conga-line of enemies that take 2 complete combos from the game's slowest weapon is excruciatingly dull.

It's unfair to compare Cuisineer to Hades, but at the same time, the lessons Hades has to offer aren't exactly a secret, so it's frustrating to see a game make this mistake. You can pour millions of coins into upgrading your gear, but the improvements are capped and so incremental that even at five stars you may as well not have bothered.

The purpose of the dungeon-crawling is to gather ingredients and building materials, and as you progress you gain access to areas with different combinations of enemies, however the frequency that you encounter enemies is not balanced against the rate you consume ingredients for dishes: As of writing I am perpetually throwing chillis, rice, flour, chicken, eggs, leafy greens and sweet sap (dropped by multiple frequently appearing enemies) in the garbage while I'm starved for beef and fish because the enemies that drop them are so uncommon, or don't drop them reliably.

This means it takes several runs to supply myself for a single day of service because so many of the endgame recipes have such a high ingredient cost.

Running the restaurant was the real selling point for me, because I love retail/hospitality sims (Diner Dash, Recettear, Dave the Diver, Potionomics) exactly as much as I hated working retail/hospitality in real life. Again, the music and visuals do a lot of the heavy lifting because the frustrating fact is that there's really not a lot to the sales aspect of Cuisineer.

People walk in, seat themselves down, think for a bit and choose a dish. No menu needed, no drinks, no input from the player. They only ever choose from the list of dishes available (except in the very early game when they demand dishes you don't have stations for for some reason) and there are no custom orders, and preparing the dishes is never more complex than clicking on the relevant cooking station and clicking on the recipe: The game will even hide any items not currently requested to prevent you from cooking an item by mistake.

The food cooks automatically, appears at the window automatically and the vast majority of customers will go to the window to collect it themselves. They'll eat the food and then see themselves to the register to pay - another one-click interaction - unless they're trying to eat and run in which case you need to catch them - yet another one-click interaction. Ultimately, what you're left with is just a series of one-click prompts, which I found very disappointing.

The implication with certain recipes like Kaya and Caramel is that you would need to prep raw ingredients into processed ingredients for complex dishes, but no - customers will literally order a jar of caramel and dishes like "Kaya Toast" only require the raw ingredients needed to make kaya and toast separately.

I'm probably being too harsh here: Food service is a high volume, low margin industry, so you can't have haggling mechanics like you do in Recettear and Potionomics and trying to balance price and quality on some kind of skill-based minigame for every dish would create an APM nightmare, but there's very little cooking in this game about cooking.

I'm running out of steam, but there's not much to be said about the town: Again, it's beautiful and the music is lovely, but the vast majority of the townsfolk are typical stationary NPCs offering side-quests whose rewards are only ever recipes, so once you've filled out your book, there's nothing more to do for them.

The exceptions are the service providers
- Brewing is not explained at all and is basically a way to randomly generate buffs to fill one of two slots for your items. These buffs are broadly useless and supposedly influenced by using dishes to alter the odds, but I've seen just as many 1-star buffs burning 4-star dishes as I have 3-star buffs using no dishes at all. The escalating expense of attempts and overwhelming number of buffs with no value make save-scumming compulsory.
- The equipment shops usually has at least one of each item type (6-ish weapons, gloves and boots) with randomised buffs, but as mentioned above, most buffs are useless and store-bought items never have buffs higher than a single star. You can upgrade the fastest weapons to do 1 more damage per hit, or the slowest weapon to do... also 1 more damage per hit. Neither of which is actually true - 2 rounds of upgrades on my ranged weapons and I was still doing exactly the same damage, so there's some opaque math involved that I can't be bothered diving into.
- The Boba Tea shop functionally sells potions, but only 1-star healing potions are available. You can upgrade them or research new potions, but the buffs from the non-healing potions are so situational that you may as well not bother.
- The carpenter sells furniture and also upgrades the size of your building. Different furniture is supposed to increase the appeal of your store to certain types of customer, but I've bankrupted myself several times with no discernible effect. The resource costs of each piece of furniture are so high that even a full endgame run's worth of materials is only enough for a few pieces. I understand that the devs have recently increased stack sizes to compensate for this, but it's a grind no matter how you look at it.
- There's a pair of carts with rotating retailers that broadly aren't worth mentioning, except the panda who has been my favourite way to offload the massive stacks of useless ingredients for a tiny amount of what i need.

I know all of this reads like a 1-star review, and I really want to emphasise that I don't consider the 40 hours I've played it to be a waste, but the repetitive dungeon grind, the imbalanced resource consumption, the flat power curve and the oversimplistic sales gameplay really make me itch to play similar games doing similar things but better.

Dragged myself away from Slay the Spire and fell straight into playing this instead.

Beautiful visuals and music and hundreds of opportunities to get screwed over by RNG.

Speak with animals has confirmed my suspicion that all dogs are in fact the best dog and that the best dog is all dogs.