Cuisineer hands-on preview

Cuisineer hands-on preview

Part dungeon crawler, part cooking game, part restaurant management sim, Cuisineer is a charming adventure that had us coming back to play several times at PAX East 2023

At first glance Cuisineer may seem like a dungeon crawler, but that’s a deception. The game is actually a restaurant management sim, with a lot of unique layers that go on top of and surround that basic idea that flush it out in some really charming ways.

The game stars Pom, an adventurer who comes home to find out that her family’s restaurant is in trouble. The only way to save it is to serve customers, and the only way to make their food is to find ingredients in the local dungeons. Hey, that seems perfect for Pom’s career choice! The PAX East demo gave us a cross-section of some of the things we’ll come across in the full game, and it all managed to fit together well.

When we begin with our restaurant we only have one table available and specific times of day that we can have it open to serve customers, and so we have to make as much profit as possible during that set time. The daily loop involved meeting the customer at their table and getting their order, making the food and serving it, and then picking up their payment. There are stations throughout the kitchen — a grill, a stove with a pot — that we need to hop around from in order to make the food. It’s easy enough at first when we’re only serving that one customer, but as the restaurant grows and more customers show up, there’s a definite Diner Dash feel in how we balance making all the food at the different stations and serving it to the right people.

It can get pretty hectic, but that’s only a part of the project; we need the ingredients to make the food for the customers.

That’s where the RPG dungeon-crawling aspect comes in. We can hunt through some of the local dungeons to get food ingredients to bring back, with sort of traditional RPG gameplay, but even the dungeons need to be managed. That’s because the game incorporates seasons (Winter, Summer, etc) with different food becoming favorites during them. And since each dungeon can have unique ingredients that can get us into the scenario that we hunt monsters and get ingredients, but we may not have the right ingredients for the food that a customer wants. So, we’ll need to understand which dungeons associate with which seasons, and which seasons to build ingredients for just in case we may run low.

Then we run back to the restaurant and start the loop again.

It’s a great combination, full of equally great little moments (there’s an NPC that’s so huge that they bleed past the screen and need to lean over to get into frame just to talk to us). Cuisineer is being developed by a small team, and there’s still a lot of content they have to finish, but I hope it releases soon because I can’t wait to play it again.

Images and video courtesy BattleBrew Productions and XSEED Games.

The game earned a Team Choice Award as one of SideQuesting’s favorite, must-see projects of PAX East 2023.