izigame.me

I really wanted to enjoy this game, and I'd give it a neutral rating if at all possible, but overall I'd have to say it fell flat for me personally due to the pacing and writing.
Minor spoiler warning!
On one hand, I enjoyed the concept a lot on paper. The twist itself COULD have been great. The music was pretty solid, and there were quite a few times when I got genuinely creeped out by the atmosphere. The "scary" art was done REALLY well; I always felt a sense of dread when the faces would change or the ghosts would appear. I loved how if you paused too long, the background noises would shift into something terrifying. That got me more than I'd care to admit when I came to sit back down after getting water and heard whispers coming through my headphones.
However, the pacing of the game takes away a lot of impact. You haven't even settled into the characters or built any type of real connection with them before the first "bad" thing happens and a character goes. This is continued throughout the whole game. I felt indifference towards each character departure because they simply... didn't matter to me. I'm unsure if this was intentional due to who the player character is supposed to be, showcasing a loss of humanity and thus ability to build actual connections with others, or if it was simply a writing issue. Either way, it left the experience somewhat hollow because each loss had no effect for me other than being an easy means to continue the plot.
Speaking of the plot, it did have its solid points. Again, I loved the premise of the game, but I think the writing really was the downfall of this experience. I wouldn't say I'm a VN snob by ANY means, but when you're doing a game like this, especially a horror one, the story IS the gameplay, so you really have to nail it since you don't have anything else to fall back on. There were a lot of instances where I wanted more explanation or detail, a "show, not tell" approach would have helped this tremendously. I dunno. I feel like I was told certain things happened, but nothing was expanded upon enough to feel satisfying or complete. There were also a few typos I found, but for me personally, it was pretty easy to ignore.
I think if the game had been longer and paced to match, it would have been not only scarier, but also more solid overall for the storytelling. I did 100% the game so I could get every bit of story out of it I could, but it just. Didn't help much. Even as I was getting my last achievements, I felt like I had missed something because there just wasn't much meat there (no pun intended). Your choices of spending time with characters doesn't do much for the story because, again, you don't care about them, and all you get are a couple more lines from them that have no impact whatsoever. The actual horror of the situation doesn't creep in and grab you, you're just placed into it with no real reaction. This could, I guess, be justified again by who the player character is and what they've done in the past, but it left me feeling unsatisfied when it felt like there was so much potential for what could happen. Plus, the reactions to the situation from the other characters felt extremely lackluster. They mostly just accept it and carry on, and though there are a few tears shed, it did nothing to reflect the actual terror that would be felt, even if they are in denial of reality. There should have been something there.
Overall, I appreciate the obvious effort and love that went into this game. It's clear the dev loves horror, and I think the passion itself is definitely there, but this game just didn't do it for me personally. I think Cooking Companions would be a great game for people that are interested in scary visuals in particular or want to stream/record themselves playing it for fun maybe with friends, but if you're looking for a solid horror VN that will scare you but also suck you in and leave you satisfied with the experience as a whole, I don't think this game would be it. If you're going to buy it, definitely wait for a good sale!