Recent reviews by Straw Man

The controls really aren't as bad as people make them out to be. The tutorial, bugs, CTDs, and the mostly optional game physics are horrendous however, and it's honestly quite hard to believe this game has been released for over a year. Even the English UI text feels translated and weird at times.

The game will know when you have made a "heating mistake" in one of your dishes, which as far as I can tell can be any of undercooking, overcooking or using a wrong heat source. However, the game will not divulge to the player what the mistake actually was, just giving the same vague "heating mistake" every time something goes wrong.

Which might be okay if the recipes were clear and consistent, but sometimes adding the 20 grams of salt listed in an ingredient will get customers complaining. Sometimes following the instructions to fry both sides of a pork chop will render an overcooked piece of crap as soon as you flip at the indicated time. Sometimes frying means pan frying something in oil. Sometimes it means dry cooking it on a griddle. Sometimes it means baking(!) something in an oven.

But the "one more turn" factor in this game is off the charts. I haven't felt such a compulsive need to play something in years.

Your best chance to not quit the game in frustration is to bypass the physics as much as possible. Don't hand cut the potatoes into fries, don't try to place them individually in the frying basket, and especially don't try to slide them into the basket directly from the cutting board.

Rather, grab an automatic cutter container and get two potatoes. Drop them in the cutter and activate. Grab a basket and highlight one piece of cut potato. Scroll-UP (one of your best friends in the game) until you have selected all 300 grams of them and left-click. Much faster, and you will hardly have any french fry explosions that way.

However, it's still not a strong recommend from me. I've had one career glitch out completely, leaving me unable to save my game, and unable to finish day 15 because of an infinite loading screen at the same time. Why? Who knows, I had a CTD just before that, when I was holding the repair telephone during the end of a cleaning phase. Maybe they'll get back to me on the Discord server they like to advertise on every Cooking Simulator thread they can find on Google.