…and then Zeus said, let there be food! And there was food… and a lot of angry deities waiting for their meal.
I used to play a lot of Restaurant City as a kid, and probably one of those pre-installed games on laptops that also were about frantic clicking under stress.
Just as the ancient theme evokes Gods of times past, the gameplay evokes golden, nostalgia-filled days. Back when the Internet was a much different, tightly-knit, fun and exciting place.
This game is tight, fun and exciting. It’s not a God amongst games, but it sure may as well sit on the Olympus of this jam.
And as if I were to judge a God, I was much as detailed as I could reviewing this game than all of the previous ones I’ve checked.
Because if you’re playing in the big leagues, and aiming high, it’s all or nothing. And here’s where you see the marks of a demigod instead.
- Keybindings. Control. I found the WASD+E default controls to be rather cramped. The game offers a way to change keybindings. Nice! I tried to change… but it defaulted to the left click button? Turns out there’s no signal to release the lock on the binding. It triggers, but it doesn’t let go. When pressing
Start, on the last frame, it changes to the last key pressed:left mouse button. It did make me lose some customers.- One thing I think would solve it all from the ground up: change to a point-and-click only control scheme. Just like those old Flash games, they were incredibly easy to pick up and harder to master. They got it right, no need to reinvent the wheel.
- Layout. I’m gonna whip out my past life’s experience and point out a thing I didn’t quite like with the layout of the kitchen. Ingredients were too close together, so it was easy to take the wrong one by mistake; an issue further compounded by the crowded default controls.
- Collision boxes. Oh, the vein of every gamedev’s existence. Either they were too close, didn’t register, or it picked the wrong thing, even if I was in the near vicinity of the object. I could’ve been 3 to 5 millimetres from the ~~air~~ deep fryer and it needed some wiggling to trigger.
- UI/UX: I’m gonna go full hog on this one.
- Hint system: Going from a cramped keyboard control to the mouse to close the overlapping windows (and then triggering something because I overrode the controls); and then mistaking the plate from a tomato salad from a potato chip with tomato plate, because the sprite was similar enough from a distance (30cm on a 2K display, full screen, to be precise)… for me it’s a fail.
- Ease of use: There’s one feature that the games I mentioned before did: you get the hints as you encounter them. They didn’t bury them in windows that you see once and then forget. You could recall the important and essential information as you went. There’s a difference between being hard for a challenge, and being hard for a bad design choice.
- Small insignificant details: like spelling, the background floating away, and some very minor bugs that basically nobody but someone obsessive with detail like me would find. But they don’t break anything. Absolutely nothing.
For a game jam this is a home run. Just like a demigod is above us poor mortals with games that are not as fun, as consistent, or as replayable as this; but you know it’s not perfect. Perfection is bold and brash, but belongs in the trash. This is way better.
Sidenote: This game is probably another good candidate to check for some Godot 4.3 bugs that are so insidious that they cannot be reproduced consistently enough to warrant an issue on GitHub. There are several things I didn’t mention that are not the dev’s fault, but the engine’s fault. Have my theories but I ain’t smart enough to fix them myself.