Review: Cuisineer Might Not Be Everyone’s Cup of Tea

Dungeon Meshi meets Rune Factory with Cuisineer, which is a cross between a roguelite dungeon crawler and restaurant manager simulation. With a fun and simple gameplay loop, as well as charming visuals, Cuisineer is a relaxing and casual treat.

In Cuisineer, you play as Pom, an adventurer, whose parents have gone on a trip around the world and left the family restaurant for her to look after. Unfortunately, they took on a massive debt in order to go on said trip. In an even more unfortunate turn of events, Pom is the one who has to pay it off or the restaurant will get repossessed.

Despite that threat, the tax person is very lax. It’s kind of like owing Tom Nook a debt, except there are absolutely no restrictions on what you can do. You can choose to spend your day going into a dungeon of your choice to find ingredients (kill monsters) or find construction and upgrade materials. It’s a roguelite, so the dungeons are randomly generated every time, though they’re not too difficult to navigate. If you don’t want to go to the dungeon, or if you have enough materials and ingredients, you can work in the restaurant. Managing it is fairly easy, and it reminds me of a cooking game I used to play on Facebook. That is to say, you’re mostly just pressing a button and waiting for it to cook.

This gameplay loop of Cuisineer is very fun. You usually need to do your other job right around when you start to get bored of your first one. For example, because of how slow the restaurant part is, I looked forward to exploring the dungeons the next day. However, because of how frustrating the dungeons can be, I’d want to relax a bit in the restaurant portion. Neither the dungeon crawling nor the cooking are incredibly deep in terms of mechanics or system. However, it’s effective precisely due to how simple the execution is. It never really felt like either part was particularly lacking, and the game integrated the two aspects in a very smooth way.

There are also lots of side quests to help stave off boredom from the above loop. Rewards come in the form of more recipes to cook in the restaurant. In my opinion, since you’re mostly just pressing a button rather than performing a Cooking Mama-like minigame when cooking, I think there could be more character-focused rewards. Some characters are really interesting, but you don’t really get to know them beyond the surface level. An intimacy or friendship system of some kind might have made the town feel more alive.

As I mentioned earlier, the dungeons can be frustrating. This is par for the course for this genre, of course. Pom doesn’t have a lot of weapons that can quickly attack in a broad range. This is normally not an issue, because you can dodge or avoid most attacks. But the enemies in the dungeon have a really annoying habit of jumping you as a mob, with some out of frame and shooting you with projectiles when you’re trying to disengage from the horde. The entire game feels very casual, like it’s something to play when you just want to unwind after a long day. So how irritating the roguelite portion can feel at times with enemy behavior stands out.

Cuisineer is fun and I genuinely enjoyed my time playing it. However, it constantly reminded me of a game that you’d play on Facebook back during the mid-2000s, or something like Mabinogi. There’s no life to the town with how little you get to know everyone. Though I personally had fun with it, I enjoyed it as a de-stressing kind of game precisely because I hardly had to think while playing it. There were no consequences whatsoever to anything, so there was no need to worry about my debt or dying. Therefore, its simplicity and lack of deeper content may make Cuisineer a little dull for another’s palate.

Cuisineer is available on Windows PCs.