Cuisineer Review

I love a chill game where I can smash out tasks and progress. That’s what made me jump on Cuisineer, a dungeon crawler where you try to get a restaurant humming. It’s all I thought I could ask for in a game to jam on the train. For the most part, it succeeds!

Pom is an adventurer who returns home from a big adventure to find her parents have abandoned the restaurant to her. Don’t worry, I am not being dark; they’re alive; they buggered off for a massive holiday. Anyway, Pom, with the help of a friend, decided to get the restaurant up and running again. She has to do everything from getting tables and chairs in there to prepping the food.

How is she going to do that? I hear you ask. Well, she has to do some dungeon crawling to get materials for building and ingredients for cooking. And this is where the real fun of the game is. Running around dungeons filling your bag with different materials is always satisfying. You’ll run around these stages with some simple combat, smashing your way through enemies, dodging traps, and trying to mop up as much loot as you can before heading back home.

When you get back home, you only have so much time in a day to organise restaurant upgrades, complete missions, and open the restaurant to make some cash. The restaurant process of cooking and running food to tables is simple enough but gets hectic running back and forth as you get busier.

For the most part, I loved playing this game. There are two major issues that drove me nuts. One is that the load time between screens is way too long. Going into your restaurant, load screen. Going into the back room to look at some of your stored materials, load screen. Leaving your room back to your restaurant. Load screen. Leaving your restaurant to go out into the town, load screen.

The other major annoyance is that when you store inventory out of your pockets, you can’t access it when you go to people like the fella that makes your chairs. If you dumped all your inventory into your chest and then went off to get some new chairs made, you’d have to go back and forth. This is annoying enough when any games do it; it’s so much worse when you have to go through that many loading screens.

But back to the positives, the game is stunning. It has a cute, charming design that looks fantastic, and a solid soundtrack helps drive home the vibes. The vibes of sitting back, dungeon crawling, and running a restaurant.

Cuisineer is a great game that almost sticks the landing. A minor design choice and a minor technical issue hold it back from being a gem I could sink hundreds of hours into. It is worth trying to power through that.