Cuisineer
A super cute and tasty roguelite-flavored dungeon crawler! Explore a lush world and defeat monsters with your trusty spatula and some boba tea, then gather delicious ingredients and bring them home to cook and serve at your restaurant!
Cuisineer is a action roguelike, cooking and anime game
developed by BattleBrew Productions
and published by Marvelous Europe and XSEED Games.
Released on November 09th 2023 is available only on Windows
in 9 languages: English, French, German, Spanish - Spain, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese - Brazil, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese.
It has received 1,629 reviews of which 1,271 were positive and 358 were negative resulting in a rating of 7.5 out of 10. 😊
The game is currently priced at 14.99€ on Steam and has a 40% discount.
The Steam community has classified Cuisineer into these genres:
Media & Screenshots
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Requirements
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Windows
- OS: Windows 10 x64
- Processor: Intel Core i5-6600K (4 * 3500) or equivalent / AMD Ryzen 5 2500U (4 * 2000) or equivalent
- Memory: 16 GB RAM
- Graphics: GeForce GTX 960 (4096 MB) / Radeon RX 560X (4096 MB)
- DirectX: Version 12
- Storage: 7 GB available space
- Sound Card: PT2001 (NVIDIA High Definition Audio)
Reviews
Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.
Cuisineer is an action roguelike game that duos as a cafe simulator. It's core gameplay loop is "good enough" to keep you playing, but ultimately falls a bit flat. The cafe simulator mechanic is similar to games like Overcooked and Coffee Caravan, but while those games have challenging skills-based gameplay, the gameplay here is trivially easy and lacks depth. The action roguelike gameplay has a bit more depth, and is similar to other games in the genre like Hades or Nuclear Throne. However, the weapon mechanics feel a bit messy and loosely designed. I still recommend this though because I find it fun, even if its mechanics can definitely be done better. If you haven't played Hades or Coffee Caravan, I highly recommend checking out those games before picking up this one. If you've played them and want to play a game that combines those two genres - albeit not with the same high quality - then this is a game you might enjoy. === A closer look at the gameplay mechanics === The Cafe: ---------- The cafe gameplay is really straightforward: 1. You wait for customers to come in and think of a menu item 2. Move to the correct prep counter to prepare the order 3. Wait for the food to magically make itself 4. Wait for the customer to pick up their meal, eat it, then walk up to the cashier counter 5. Cash the customer out There's pretty much just a lot of waiting around. The amount of customers that come in make it just barely frantic enough to be a little bit fun. But compared to games with similar mechanics, it feels a bit disappointing. If there were a way to increase the difficulty that would be great. For instance, It would be much more fun if instead of waiting for the food to magically prepare itself, you had to prepare the food yourself. But unfortunately this isn't how the game works. Furthermore, the highest difficulty setting is "normal" and the gameplay is never very challenging. The Action Roguelike: ----------------------- The action roguelike gameplay is a bit more in-depth, there are ton of different enemies with different attack patterns. You have to strategize and exercise skill while you're playing. But where it falls flat is where Hades shines (a similar game): in the mechanic design of the weapons. While each weapon in Hades as a different mechanic that you have to master, all the weapons in Cusineer are practically the same, just with different animation lengths and damage per hit. A spatula swings fast with low damage, a knife swings slower with higher damage, a tenderizer swings even slower with even higher damage. The result is that you pretty much decide early on which you like and you never really diverge from that style. You do have "alternate" weapons that you can fight with by pressing a different button, and these have a bit more variance in mechanics. I find myself only using one of them though, because it synergizes the best with slow-swinging weapon style of the knife and the tenderizer. Ironically, it's mechanically very similar to the other main weapon choice, the spatula. While there are many other alternate weapon options to choose from, they just didn't feel as effective. All-in-all the game could do with more main-weapon variance and more though put into how the alternate weapons synergize with the main weapons. The town: ----------- Technically there is a third part of the gameplay loop. Your restaurant is part of a town, and in the town there's a lot of people and shops to interact with. You can upgrade your shop, upgrade your weapons, or add buffs to your weapons. You can also talk to various townsfolk who will occasionally give you fetch quests. The design in upgrading your weapon makes no sense. you only increase your damage by one point with each upgrade, you're limited to a max of five upgrades, and each upgrade gets increasingly more expensive. It's incredibly costly to upgrade your weapon for almost no additional benefit. The mechanic is set up, but it seems like it was never iterated on to find the right balance. The bewery is where you can add buffs to your weapons. Most of the weapons you find already have buffs, so I've never really used the brewery. Its mechanics aren't very intuitive either. You have to cook a recipe beforehand and bring it with you to the brewery, but there's no in-game manual for what recipes give what buffs. Once you're at the brewery, You choose a weapon then a dish or two to brew with it, and you have a _chance_ of getting a buff - it's not garunteed you'll actually get one. Again, it's costly and doesn't seem very effective, and kind of confusing and hard to plan for. The boba shop is a lot more engaging and well designed. You start with only one type boba, which is like a health potion, but you can upgrade it and unlock new bobas by bringing prepared dishes to the shopkeepers. The cost is a lot more manageable and the benefit is a bit better than the other shops. The only issue is that during the heat of battle, you really can only have one boba ready, and you can't reorder them on your belt once you've purchased them. The boba mechanic is almost there, but needs better controller hotkeys. The townsfolk give you fetch quests which unlock more recipes. I think the fetch quests are fun, because it gives you a goal of what loot to prioritize picking up when you're exploring the world. Unlocking recipes is good because it makes the cafe gameplay more engaging. Review: -------- The game is fun, but I can't say it's "super fun." It's a good game, but a can't say it's a "great" game. It seems like there was a lot of feature creep, and the team just didn't have the time and resources to iterate on them. I think the game would have done a lot better if they'd kept their scope small and focused on perfecting the core gameplay loop.
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Cuisineer is such a unique cross of a dungeon crawler and restaurant sim, I love all the little creatures that give the different ingredients and I have had a blast designing my restaurant. There are so many little quests you can do and of course the shenanigans of mom, dad, and the tax man. This is the first game I have ever played that has what I would describe as a relaxing restaurant mechanic. Not being required to stand in front of a workstation to cook and customers getting their own food makes it so much more fun to see who is visiting and what they want to order instead of being stressed about getting everything to everyone. The dungeons are challenging without being ridiculous and the character art is so cute! Highly recommend, and I've had so much fun!
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This definitely isn't a "everyone's cup of tea" game, however it is up my alley in the sort of games I like, it's very similar to another game I played called Moonlighter which I adored, Both games have you exploring dungeons to get what you need to further progress and upgrade, whether you go into dungeons for food items, quests or materials. The art style is also very cute. All in all it's a fun and cute game about running your own restaurant and getting upgrades and new recipes to explore further in dungeons, do quests and upgrade your weapons, restaurant etc to go further. A very fun and enjoyable game in my opinion.
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This isn't really a full on review, more like a collection of thoughts I gathered while playing the game (You have a lot of time to think) The main thing I want to talk about is that the content is paced really weird. You will have seen all the weapons within the first two to three hours, which have variation to offer... but not to much and you will find what works pretty quick. The restaurant side of the game only really gets interesting 15–20 Hours in once you have to watch out for noble people, because they expect to get served instead of picking up their own food. Up until then it's kinda boring and there is a lot of downtime in between picking something to auto-cook and collecting money. The new dungeons unlock at a reasonable pace. But it didn't feel like there was a real incentive to get to the end and beat the dungeon's final boss, since apart from a side quest to beat the first two bosses, there is no special loot that makes you want to kill them. Because of that, it's not worth gambling to lose all the stuff you collected for a boss that gives you the same things you already collected during the entire dungeon AND probably have more than enough of already. The league of Cuisineers battles close to the end of the game are a great idea in mixing up the gameplay and would have been great to have throughout the entire game now and then. The final boss is unreasonably difficult for what is up until this point pretty much a low-stakes cosy-cooking and ingredients collector. It took me around 1,5 to 2 hours to get the patterns down. I'm usually all for hard fights, but it did come completely out of the blue. Felt like playing animal crossing and suddenly having to fight Ornstein and Smough from Darksouls. The game is undercooked, still eatable, but a bit chewy at times.
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cuisuineer is a really solid game. i first found out about it at PAX aus 2022 and i've been super excited for it's release since then. a dungeon crawler and shop management game? i love shop management games and the dungeon aspect adds a nice bit of spice that keeps it interesting for me, and the art style is AMAZING - super freaking cute and well-done. but there are a few major issues with this game for me (and then some nitpicky things). major things: after the initial tutorial at the beginning of the game which explains the basics of combat and restaurant management, the game essentially explains nothing else to you. i'm all for trial-and-error and not having every single thing spelt out in a game, but this one NEEDS a tutorial here and there. you do receive tips and tricks in the mail, but usually LONG after they are actually useful and after a while they just get resent in the mail. the brewery NEEDS a tutorial. im 50 hours in and i have no idea how it even works. i understand that this sort of thing is meant to be trial and error, but it explains next to nothing. it does have a tab which lists every single buff you get for your weapons, and says to combine with cooking to get particular buffs but that's it. there is so many different buffs, and there's a whole tier system for the buffs but it's so much and so confusing that i prefer not to bother with that entire aspect of the game. i wish the game explained upgrading your cooking equipment or hinted at how to unlock cooking higher-tier recipes. in early game, customers will come into your shop looking for meals that you physically can't prepare but you have no idea why. it just needs a little something to send you in the right direction. it's loading time is quite slow and it can be quite buggy. i play this game on two devices - a brand new custom gaming pc and my old lenovo gaming laptop. initially, my game was only stuttering and taking ages to load on the laptop, but after the most recent patch it has been chugging it on both devices. moreso, something in the game keeps breaking and causing pom to become randomly stuck in place and fall through the ground in dungeons until i am forced to exit and restart and the day. nitpicky things: in terms of the actual dungeon crawling it definitely gets repetitive. the screen can look very cluttered at times from visual effects when there are multiple enemies in a room at a time. the bosses are a nice change of pace from the normal hack-and-slash. the dash can feel a bit slow or delayed(?), so it often feels like I have to time my dash exactly right or I'll never avoid combat damage (i'm also just bad at games). the actual restaurant itself can get quite hectic and almost stressful at late stages of the game, especially as the size of the space increases but you remain as the only person running the store. if you place your stoves etc. on the side with serving stations the interaction ui can get a bit finnicky to when trying to click to prepare meals. this might just be a me thing, but i found every single npc forgettable. all the npcs are adorable - the art style is AGAIN, really well done for this game. but when interacting with npcs and finding out why i'm being sent to do a quest i find myself skipping through all their dialogue 9/10 times. npcs have "story" and "lore" but i don't feel any connection. there's a particular quest you get from biscotti, who is meant to be your best friend in the game, where she wants ingredients because her mother is ill. pom is of course more than happy to help her best friend's sick mother, but i didn't feel any reason to care that her mother is sick. i do think the fact that you can complete a quest and immediately be given the follow-up doesn't help with this feeling. i also felt that biscotti's artwork when talking about being worried about her mother didn't appropiately reflect the feeling. this is all of course, EXTREMELY nitpicky of me and i know story telling isn't the purpose of this game. overall i have really enjoyed cuisuineer, albeit frustratingly at times. i do recommend it - whether you want to have mindless fun or run the most optimised restaurant or clear every dungeon. it's super cute and can be a little challenging at times, but it's overall a good experience! :D
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Last Updates
| Steam data | 16 November 2024 00:54 |
|---|---|
| SteamSpy data | 19 December 2024 22:06 |
| Steam price | 23 December 2024 12:49 |
| Steam reviews | 23 December 2024 13:48 |
Online players
54
Developer
BattleBrew Productions
Publisher
Marvelous Europe,
XSEED Games
Release
09 Nov 2023
Platforms
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