Strangely Fun

Steam and it's plethora of sales have made me into an impulse buyer.  75% off!  Heck yeah--I'll buy some random game I've never heard of.  I recently made an impulse purchase that turned out to be really great.  Cook. Serve, Delicious was 50% off so I snatched it up like a weird hot potato.  I've been mashing buttons and potatoes for a few days now and enjoying it.

Cook, Serve, Delicious is described on the Steam store page as a "hardcore cooking sim."  I've played a few cooking games and they're pretty fun.  CSD revolves around players running a fictitious restaurant.  Your goal is to help your restaurant grow from a pitiful no star establishment that serves low-class foods like corn dogs and hot pretzels to a shining five-star restaurant that serves lobster and expensive wines.  At each level players must accomplish certain goals to improve the rating of their restaurant.  One of those goals is running your restaurant successfully for 20 days.  Each gameplay day consists of the player setting the menu and then filling customer orders correctly as well as performing vital chores like washing the dishes or taking out the trash.  To fill an order the player must correctly enter the combination of keystrokes for that specific order--and you want to do it as quickly as you can.  Let's say we're in our crappy no-star restaurant and someone orders a corndog with mustard.  I would have to press the correct ticket number (1-3 in a no-star restaurant) and them press M, for mustard, and enter to fill the order.  Simple, right?  Not exactly.  Certain times of the day are "rush hour" and customer orders are placed as fast as you can fill them, oh and the garbage needs taken out, or there are rats, or the trash needs taken out, and there are more orders...sheesh!  Customers won't wait forever for you to fill their orders so if you decide to do a chore their order might start to disappear.  Mess up on an order or miss an order and the customer will storm out angrily earning you "negative buzz" and never returning.

This may sound a little odd, but it's extremely addicting fun.  I've progressed to the point that I am running a 3-star restaurant.  As your restaurant gets better the recipes get more complicated and the pace gets much more frantic.  In my 3-star restaurant I have 7 prep stations that can take orders--during rush-hour it's a mad house.  There are also other management related tasks, like balancing your menu for the most buzz or winning bets for cash.  To keep moving up the ranks you must earn enough cash to upgrade recipes--making them more complicated and pass health inspections.

Cook, Serve, Delicious is a great little indie cooking/management game.  It's fairly priced and a ton of fun.  If you're a perfectionist this game will drive you mad.  Pick it up on the Steam store (Here) or for your mobile device.

UPDATE 12/11/16:  Now that I've completely played through CSD I thought I would add a little more to make this more reviewlike.

As your restaurant progresses, CSD gets tougher.  Menus have to be balanced and buzz has to be maintained all while you scramble to fill orders.  The more money you make means that you have to decide which recipes to upgrade and which to skip.  Certain recipes offer much challenge--shish kabobs require you to make sure that the same ingredient doesn't touch, lasagna must be layered in a specific pattern or else it's considered a bad order, bananas foster sometimes must be flambe-d, and don't even get me started on sushi and soup. Of course you could always choose not to upgrade your recipes, but you'll be missing out the cash to be made from offering higher quality foods.

Eventually you reach the coveted five-star restaurant status and get to experience the magic of occupying the top floor of the SheriSoda towers.  Once you've finished the main game there are still plenty of challenges in store--BattleKitchen edition offers individual challenges to beat with each challenge getting tougher.  I still haven't finished all of them.  There is also an option for some sort of co-op or head-to-head challenge mode (I didn't mess with this, so I'm not quite sure how it works).  Then, if you're feeling truly sadistic you can start a new game on "extreme difficulty."  Extreme difficulty means you are frantically mashing buttons most of the day with Rush Hours lasting twice as long and turning from slightly panicked to full-on disaster mode.  It's not for the faint of heart.

Cook, Serve Delicious is a great game that has a lot to offer for fans of games that require quick reflexes or for those who enjoy the management aspect.