Cuisineer Review – A Little Underbaked

Cuisineer is a shallow but fun cozy roguelike game, with restaurant management. Neither half of the game has a ton of depth, but together they make for an ultimately enjoyable, if shallow experience. It does have cute aesthetics and fun enough characters, but that never really expands beyond what you see at the start.

Cuisineer
Developer: BattleBrew Productions
Price: $30
Platforms: Xbox Series X|S (reviewed), PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, and PC
The publisher provided an Xbox Series X code for review.

A Blend of Roguelike Combat and Restaurant Charm

Cuisineer combines the run-based combat of a roguelike with a Diner Dash-esque restaurant management system, although both halves feel a bit undercooked. In order to create dishes in your restaurant, on top of creating new furniture and expanding your cooking capabilities, you must perform runs in different dungeons, collecting ingredients and resources. On days you aren’t doing dungeon runs, you can open the restaurant, serving up dishes to earn money to pay off tax debts and improve the restaurant.

The idea here is excellent and both aspects of the game feed into each other well, but neither of them feel as fleshed out as I would like. The combat is a bit simple; you have a primary weapon and a secondary weapon, typically a melee and a ranged, both of which have a simple attack pattern and a special attack on a cooldown. Because the moveset is so simple, it doesn’t feel like you are improving much outside of slightly improving your skill. The ramp-up in difficulty comes from an increase of enemies, almost reaching bullet-hell levels of projectiles on screen, but the offensive attacks you have at your disposal don’t quite match the escalation.

You can switch weapons, and there is certainly a nice variety, but upgrading takes far too long. You can upgrade up to five stars, but each level takes an entire day for the blacksmith, discouraging experimentation at the later stages of the game. You can change the abilities of your equipment by using recipes you cook, which is a simple way to mix up your strategy, but most of these are stat boosts, nothing game-changing. 

Managing Pom’s Restaurant – Cute but Repetitive

The actual flow of the dungeons is quite satisfying, with you taking out different enemies to collect ingredients. Each enemy type drops a specific type of ingredient, so you can easily tell at a glance what you could get from battling with an enemy. Since you have limited inventory space, being able to quickly and easily understand which enemies you can ignore and which ones you want to fight allows for quick decision making. There are bosses on the third and sixth floors, which offer big chests of rewards. These chests can be earned from battle arenas on some floors, offering a mix of ingredients and equipment, offering some tempting risk-reward choices.

Once you have gathered your ingredients, you can return to run your restaurant. There are four types of dishes, which can be made with different cooking apparatus. To unlock new recipes, you must complete tasks for the villagers. Most of these are fetch quests, requiring you to gather a large quantity of ingredients or cooked dishes, but these are doled out in a way that encourages exploration and grinding that you would need to do anyway, but more variety would have certainly been welcomed.

When the restaurant is open, the flow is simple. Customers come in, order a dish, select it at the correct station, and once it’s cooked the customer will grab it and eat. Your primary roles here are starting each dish and checking customers out when they pay. Cuisineer places order dishes as soon as you open the cooking menu, a nice quality-of-life choice, but it does mean that you don’t have that much to do. It’s mostly running back and forth from the kitchen to the cash register, hitting the same button repeatedly. Eventually, you get some customers who expect to have their dish brought to them, but the overall restaurant management lacks depth. It becomes trite, especially once you have done it a few dozen times, which you will need to do to earn enough money to advance the plot.

Cozy Fun with Limited Depth

The story is simple, with Pom returning to run her parents’ abandoned restaurant to pay back taxes. The characters are fairly one note, especially the townsfolk, but the art style is incredibly cute and each character has a distinct and creative animal design. That cute art style carries over to the dungeons too, making it incredibly cozy for roguelike. 

I’m torn on the restaurant decorations aspect. On one hand, there is a nice variety of tables, chairs, and decorations, allowing you to create a cohesive style or a mishmash, depending on your personal preference. However, some items attract certain types of customers, including the ones that almost always order more expensive dishes, so there is some incentive to focus on those decorations. There isn’t much information besides a small icon indicating those customers like the furniture, so it’s not clear how many of those items you need or if you can max out at a certain point.

The Final Word

Ultimately, Cuisineer is a cozy experience that offers some simple roguelike combat and management gameplay. Neither is particularly great on their own, but together they do create an engaging, if ultimately shallow, experience. I can’t recommend this to anyone who loves a challenging and deep roguelike, but if you enjoy cozy experiences and don’t mind some slightly tougher combat, Cuisineer is a good enough time.

MonsterVine Rating: 3 out of 5 – Average