In Cuisineer, you play as a cat girl named Pom who is returning to her hometown of Paell to see her parents off before they go on a trip around the world. By the time she gets there, however, her parents are long gone. One thing leads to another and Pom ends up re-opening her parents' restaurant, Potato Palace, and paying off a series of escalating debts that her parents owe to the taxman. It's not a particularly compelling story, nor is there any sort of deadline to pay which means doing so can fall to the wayside, but it's something to work towards while you expand your restaurant.

I don't believe every videogame has to redefine the genre; sometimes it's just enough to be fun. Cuisineer's tried and true gameplay loop is definitely fun. I'm playing on Steam Deck, by the way, and it works perfectly out of the box. If you've played Moonlighter, Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale, or similar titles you know exactly what you're getting into: you'll enter dungeons to source materials they you can turn into dishes to sell as well as to upgrade your restaurant and Pom's combat capabilities, customize and operate a restaurant, and complete side quests for the locals, who will then give you recipes for new dishes to add to your menu. I'll give a breakdown on each of those facets as well as some pros and cons.

Combat—I regularly play action roguelikes, cutting my teeth on the likes of Dead Cells, Moonlighter, Cult of the Lamb and, in comparison, Cuisineer's combat isn't terribly challenging. Which is fine. Sometimes it's nice not to have to struggle. Most of the difficulty comes from being overwhelmed by enemies, though it's pretty easy to get away from danger by using your dash. Enemies drop ingredients and the destructible environment drops wood, stone, and the like for crafting furniture and upgrading your restaurant and cooking stations. They'll also sometimes drop equipment.

The level layouts are procedurally generated, though you'll run into very similar formats, and that means sometimes you can only go so many floors before hitting a dead end. Occasionally, you'll encounter an arena, which will stay locked until you defeat all enemies within the room, and a boss type enemy with a health bar. In both cases, succeeding rewards you with a chest full of goodies. There's no leveling up system and skills are tied to the type of weapons you equip, one of which is ranged and one of which is melee. The weapons are thematically strong, so you'll be fighting with dinner plates, spatulas, meat tenderizers, and even whole mackerel (AKA "Smackerel") and every weapon type feels distinctly different.

That being said, you'll be fighting the same handful of enemy and visiting the same handful of locales again and again. I don't mind, but if you're expecting a large enemy list with different behaviours to memorize, Cuisineer is much more simplified than that.

Unfortunately, unlike in Moonlighter, gameplay in Cuisineer isn't structured to allow you to manage your time unless you open your restaurant for the day first and THEN go into the dungeon. I say that because no matter how long you're in a dungeon, whether it's for five minutes or five hours in real time, when you exit a dungeon it will be minutes to midnight back in Paell. That gives you enough time to maybe turn in a quest or two before rushing to bed. Like some kind of Cinderella, Pom goes straight to bed once the clock strikes midnight, after which a new day begins. There's no penalty for what would be considered passing out in a farming sim, though Pom will get fatigued if you overwork her, which leads to an HP debuff of up to 30%. This also means that if you need ingredients from two different biomes, you'll only be able to tackle one of them on any given day.

Running the restaurant—Cooking in Cuisineer is very simple: as long as you have the right ingredients in your fridge or oh your person, you can use one of the cooking stations—an oven, frying pan, preparation station, and pot—to create a dish. Dishes you don't have the ingredients for are greyed out. These stations can be upgraded as long as you have the money and resources, which makes their available queue larger and enables access to more complex recipes.

You can cook at any time. When the restaurant is open and a customer is waiting for an order, the queue is automatically populated with the dish they want and all you have to do is click on it to start cooking. After a specified period of time (usually no more than a few seconds), the cooking station will spit out a dish onto the counter and most customers will serve themselves. You can pick the dish up off of the counter and bring it to where they're sitting, but given the speed at which you move versus the speed at which NPCs move, you'll have to wait for them to sit back down before you can serve them, so it's really not worth the effort. After they've eaten, your patron will go to the checkout counter and you hit that same interaction button to check them out. Some guests will try to eat and run, in which case you need to catch them before they reach the door and interact with them to collect for their bill.

In my opinion, this process could have been improved by including a mini game that varied by cooking station, similar to crafting in Spiritfarer.

I did like that you can open and close your restaurant as many times as you'd like. There's also peak operating hours, namely a lunch rush and a dinner rush, during which you'll see an uptick in patrons.

Life in Paell—The town serves as your hub where you can upgrade your gear at the smithy, buy new furniture and decor for your restaurant from a rotating series of merchants, and complete side quests for NPCs. The art style and Asian aesthetic is what really caught my attention and I find myself appreciating just how lovely everything is. The NPCs, though cute, don't have much variety in what they say outside of when they have a side quests to give you, which makes the lovely little town seem less cozy.

Every request consists of a fetch quest in which you need to bring back a number of raw ingredients or cooked dishes to fulfill it. I liked that you could turn in whatever number of items you already have rather than having to wait until you have everything, making it easier to incrementally complete larger orders. Your reward for being a good little helper is a new recipe to add to your repertoire. On that note, I wouldn't advise playing Cuisineer if you're hungry because the descriptions of food and accompanying image will give send you searching for a takeout menu. I'm no cook, but they seem pretty authentic to me.

Some small cons aside, I wholeheartedly recommend this game. If you like cute, casual indie titles and don't mind a repetitive bit of grinding while you work towards the next upgrade, you'll enjoy this. If you're looking for a more in-depth simulation game or combat that will absolutely put your roguelike skills to the test, this is not the one.