A productive weekend of playing games and writing reviews, I realise that the imminent release of Abra-Cooking-Dabra means that this needs to be written before the punters start clawing at the tables. Never a dull moment, eh?
I had the pleasure of looking at Door 407’s game back in the Summer and was quite impressed by just how well executed it is. It’s Overcooked, but it uses a deck-building type scenario that’s not quite conventional. Innovative in its approach, it’s far from complicated, and you’ll be honing your time management skills more than anything.
Using the classic model we’re all familiar with now, the customers in Abra-Cooking-Dabra will enter your restaurant (which looks like a seedy underground mahjong parlour), and request (demand) a specific dish for you to assemble. Unlike all the other hair-pulling multitaskers, you only control the layout of the cards on the table.
That in itself is deceptive. For each request that pops up with an on-screen timer indicating when they’re going to up and leave, thus affecting your rating, you have to lay a card on another to create an action, i.e., dragging an onion over a knife will peel it. Do it again and they’ll be diced. When you have the desired effect, you then combine this with the ingredients necessary to make the customer dish, and then drag that card to the customer for consumption. Easy!
As long as you keep the punters happy, they’ll keep paying you coins that can be used to unlock new ingredients. Said ingredients aren’t an immediate fix, however, as you will often have the ‘base’ item, such as a seed that needs to be dragged to the garden card, then chopped, then added to the dish for garnishing, or the chicken and the egg…
In addition to Abra-Cooking-Dabra’s ingredient list, there’s a plethora of equipment on offer that stores your goods to stack for the next sitting, or owning utensils that create a dish using a new, sought-after method. By the end of the shift, you can then sell any excess items to the most ignorant cat ever, or store them away for leftovers, a.k.a. tomorrow’s profit.
I don’t really have that much else to add to Abra-Cooking-Dabra since the first coverage. Whether you read about that or intend to, to summarise, I would have happily kept playing the game, but it was only a demo. Now that the game is out, I can’t say enough good things about it. Sure, a good old point and click or relaxing simulator might be more my thing these days, though this game is one of the more fun stress types.
While I quite like the odd frantic food harvesting chaos games that rear their head every so often, the classic drag and drop is a much more intuitive – dare I say – accurate method, meaning there’s a lot more pleasure to be had and without blaming the complicated controls. Taste is subjective, and aside from the furballs, I’m liking this a lot.
