izigame.me

Cuisineer is a beautifully crafted, cute, and fun roguelite game. Two hours in and I can see the appeal of the game. It's easy to pick up and play, and does not require massive time expenditures to get "into" the game. The artwork is gorgeously crafted, and the characters are all wonderfully rendered.
Pros:
+ Intuitive gameplay, obviously Hades inspired with the dashing, weapon selections, dungeon generation, and boss fights.
+ Clear gameplay loop: slaughter helpless monsters for their meat, turn your plundered goods into food, feed town for money, buy better gear so you may slaughter more monsters in the dungeon.
+ Amazing artwork, clean and well rendered anime style.
+ Well polished combat gameplay with many ways to clear dungeon. Well balanced progression of enemies and weapons.
+ Many hours of potential gameplay loop justifies the price tag.
Potential Oversights:
Polish:
- Day/Night cycle timer runs when viewing inventory. This was incredibly frustrating when I was thinking about how much wood/stone I needed to bring to the carpenter, and it turned out that I missed a third of the daytime time counting wood.
- Talking with NPCs triggers a half second fade-in/fade-out animation. It's OK the first dozen times, but it becomes jarring after a while
- Controller icon when selecting items creates a large icon that hides the item icon in the inventory. I had to switch back to M+K several times to correctly get inventory items and to see what's needed for recipes.
- Several times in conversations, portraits are mirrored in the incorrect direction. Early on, Praline is on the left side of the dialog window, but looks left instead of right.
Gameplay:
- The naming of days as "sweet, salty, umami, etc." was not immediately clear that these were the Paell version of days of the week. Sticking these icons and a number under the world map threw me for a confusing loop until I deduced they were the icons for the season, day of the week, and the icon for the day of the week.
- Having weapons and non weapons in the inventory was annoying. With inventory slots being so valuable in the ingredient gathering part of the core game loop, it over emphasizes how fast you need to get inventory slots from the llama tailor because you will need to carry 2-3 weapons for dungeons to defeat bosses. You can upgrade them from the dragon brewer, but it still removes 2-3 slots from your inventory at all times.
- Spatula special weapon uses icon from NextFest, but uses a cast iron pan model. Was confusing until I remembered it was the same special weapon from the Demo.
- Why can't we change the location of the cash register? Obviously players will put it right next to the stove so they have minimal movement during restaurant opening hours, but if we don't have to carry food to the customers after it's done, it seems to exist only to force the player away from the stove/oven.
Overall, the game is already well polished and delivers an entertaining experience. Future patches will likely (hopefully) iron out the oversights that I saw in the game. Regardless of what complaints I found, the hours I played were certainly entertaining and I can't wait to see how this game's supported in the future.