Cuisineer is about a catgirl adventurer named Pom who returns to her hometown after receiving a strangely worded letter from her parents. It turns out they aren't actually on the brink of death, but instead closed down their restaurant and went out to tour the world. Pom decides to reopen the restaurant to reconnect with her old friends and help out her hometown. Oh, and also to pay off her parents' many, many debts. Thanks a lot, P and M.
The gameplay consists of two parts - going out into the wilderness to collect cooking ingredients and building materials, and running the restaurant itself. Both of them are very, very grindy and repetitive.
First, the adventuring. It's really shallow. You don't have a very good selection of weapons. Combat doesn't feel especially good. And when you start out your inventory is absolutely tiny. You can upgrade your equipment and storage space, but that requires even more grinding to have enough money and materials. There are different biomes to explore that all offer unique ingredients and materials, but you can only enter one dungeon per in-game day. Each dungeon run takes 10-15 minutes or so until you either fill up your inventory or clear each floor and beat a couple of bosses.
And then there's running the restaurant. This part is easy, at least, as it's mostly automated, but it's tedious and grindy. When you open the restaurant, customers come in and make an order. Then all you have to do is stand in front of the correct equipment - a fryer, a stove, an oven, or a prep table - and push a couple of buttons to start making food. It all happens automatically, so once dishes are queued up you can run around and do other stuff. When the dish is complete, the customers actually go to the counter and pick up their food themselves. Except for the dirtbag nobles who expect you to serve them. You do have to collect everyone's money when they're finished, though, so you're constantly running back and forth from the kitchen to the cash box 75-100 times. Each day in the restaurant is like 10-minutes or so.
You can expand the restaurant, upgrade your cooking equipment, and build new seating and decorations, but all of that requires more grind grindy grinding out in the wilderness to get materials. To get new recipes you have to help the other characters around town which requires, you guessed it, more grinding for materials and ingredients to give them the stuff they need.
The whole game is just grindy repetitive tediousness. And the further into it you get, the more grindy and tedious it gets because you have more and more material and ingredient types to manage. Some more gameplay variety or at least upgrades and progression that actually felt satisfying would go a long way here.
In spite of all of that, I don't dislike Cuisineer. I actually like games that just give you tasks and then get out of the way and let you do them. As a fairly mindless time waster, Cuisineer isn't that bad. And it is definitely undeniably cute. Not just the main character Pom, either, but everyone around town is very, very cute. And some of them are straight up sexy. I mean, look at these two! Holy crap. The artists definitely knew what they were doing with the character designs in this game.
All in all, your enjoyment of Cuisineer depends entirely on how long you can tolerate the grinding and repetition of alternating between the shallow adventuring and equally shallow restauranteering. The presentation definitely helps, but even the overwhelming cuteness starts to wear thin after a few hours of the grind. The $30 price tag isn't doing it any favors, either. That is a lot to ask for a game I don't think most players will see through to the end because you see everything it has to offer well before you're even close to finishing. I would still recommend it, especially with a price drop, but make sure you understand what you're getting into before you buy.
Comments
Post a Comment