Cook for Love captures life as a new chef as you try to master a bunch of different dishes when opening your own restaurant.
There is nothing I love more than a casual cooking game to play on a Saturday morning as I listen to the birds outside my window. So, when Cooking for Love came out on Xbox, I was pretty excited to try it out! This cooking game is all about Clement, a young Frenchman who was left to run a small restaurant and learn how to cook himself. This game has this calming aesthetic in the music and graphic style, which feels quite nice paired together. The game is slow paced, kind of like a point and click game, where you find yourself looking at a new recipe each round, then doing the steps on the card.
There are a bunch of different screens for parts of your kitchen, and you can hold one bowl item and two plate items to take between the various screens. This means that you will often be grabbing your ingredients, taking them to a screen to be blended, chopped, mixed, or whatever they need to have done, then move them to another spot to cook or serve. You can easily see what needs to be done at the top of the screen, but if you struggle, you can also select to see a more in-depth bit of instructions.
Regardless of what you are making in Cook for Love, the recipes themselves are often really, really simple. At the start, you are making a bunch of ‘cream of’ soups. Despite having cream in the fridge, you will still be chopping, blending, and cooking before serving. It’s a little strange, especially as the plated soup often has other things in it (like cream, or ham, which are both in your kitchen).
Cook for Love doesn’t have a sort of timer or specific orders. Instead, you are moving forward cooking the next new thing you learn, one after another. Often these foods are in groups (I did three different, but mostly the same, really, fruit pancakes before going to pasta). At first, this makes sense in the story as you are just feeding your neighbour and haven’t opened a restaurant, but once you have opened, it does seem a bit odd.
In between larger blocks of the game, you do get bits of story from the people that come to your restaurant, though often they don’t talk about enjoying the food. I do wish the story felt more important and like it made more sense. At least you unlock more items and screens so that you can cook more complex dishes as you go along.
I have mixed feelings about Cook for Love. I feel like a lot of the game starts to feel too much the same. There isn’t a timer or customers ordering, per se, but if you put ice in the freezer longer than the timer it can actually go bad. You can also burn items and need to throw them away, which does make more sense, but feels a little silly. I also find the moving items from screen to screen a touch frustrating. In the pastas, I needed to cook two things on the stove, so did it at the same time, but then needed to move the pasta to plating and then come back and move the sauce to plating as both needed a bowl. This just feels really cumbersome. I do like the cozy vibes the game gives off, but I feel that some of the mechanics are more convoluted then they should be. However, the recipes do always look lovely in the end!
Cook for Love is available now on the Nintendo eShop, Microsoft Store, and Steam.
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