izigame.me

I really want to like this game and I do genuinely enjoy the majority of it. However there are some glaring oddities about the experience that make me scratch my head wondering what the Devs were thinking. I'm not going to deep dive the experience and give meaningless platitudes about the parts of the game that I adored; rather, I'm going to cover the most confusing choices that I've seen and hope for some kind of feedback about them.
There is no social system whatsoever. No friendships, no romance options, no gift giving and no rewards to earn. I'm not saying that every wholesome game like this requires one, but it would have really helped Cuisineer in my honest opinion. The character design is really good and the art is super satisfying. Being able to get to know the other villagers to a meaningful degree would have been really nice. Instead you'll just receive requests to complete a task periodically and get a recipe each time. It works as a good way to get new recipes, but I would have loved to have seen this fleshed out a bit more.
Hired Help. Much like Moonlighter, from which the game clearly draws much of its inspiration, it would be nice to be able to hire help or put premade dishes into a kiosk or stall outside the restaurant to make money while the character is out and about. Instead, the Devs appear to have made a conscious choice to force the player to only make money running the restaruant.
Eating the food seems like a novel idea in a game all about making delicious looking recipes and selling them to customers. You heard me right, you can't eat the food you make. Cooked food is dead weight in your inventory. It can't be consumed or sold after its made. To add another layer to the irritation, the NPCs will periodically gift you food items with which you can literally do nothing. It would be great if you get a food item that you don't have the recipe for and you could deconstruct it and learn the recipe, but nope. The NPCs gift you food on ***Their*** birthday and the only thing you can do is throw it in the trash. Such an odd choice. I would have loved to see a system where each dish that you prepare has different buffs and by experimenting with the food items you could come up with new recipes and then prioritize ingredients for the recipes that provide your preferred effects, but nope. There is no such system.
Progression is super lackluster. When you're running the restaurant, you're always looking for ways to improve your bottom line or better the experience for your customers, however the game doesn't provide any meaningful way for you to do this. The recipes that you get are automatically added to your theoretical menu and any customer can select any recipe with no rhyme or reason for their choice. The only caveat here is that, (Typically), lower income customers order lower tiered food items and higher income customers order higher tiered items. While we're on the topic of the Nobles and Peasants, the only way I've been able to determine that you get more wealthy clientele is by raising the reputation of your business, but the progression for your Reputation takes so long, that after 79 days in game, I'm only at level 16. I've never seen a noble person and the most common tier of customer I get are peasants by a vast majority. I've upgraded my restaurant to level 7 and have all the nicest looking (to me) furniture. I even went so far as to buy and install the items that have arrows pointing up with a picture of a noble next to them, but there's no perceivable difference in my clientele. There is no way to customize your menu so I can't force the customers to buy items that I have ingredients for either. Instead they come in with a predetermined preference that you often can't facilitate. Then they just stand by the door and get angry before leaving in a huff.
Progression Cont'd: Weapon progression. Weapon progression is super irrelevant with the player needing to grind for an immense amount of time and expend an immense amount of resources only to receive a minor increase in weapon or gear effectiveness. Upgrading an item takes a whole day and requires exponentially increasing amounts of materials in addition to the vast amount of money to get a meager +1 to dmg per level for weapons and 5 HP per level for gloves/boots. The added effects or bonus traits on the items do not upgrade with the weapons either. The only way to get better bonus traits is to find them in the wild or purchase them in the shops for a huge markup in value. Additionally you can use the "Brew" system where the NPC in charge apparently dunks the item in their cookpot before blindfolding themselves and then grabbing ingredients for their stew and throwing them in the general direction of the cauldron, hoping they'll produce an effect. There's a very odd and confusing UI for the Brews that on one tab shows you all the various effects that are possible and then lets to gamble for a random upgrade. You cannot choose the bonus trait you want or select from an option, instead you roll for it and get charged 500+ money the first time, 605 the second time, 675 the third time, 750 the fourth and so on to hope you get the desired effect. To put that into perspective, if I open my restaurant for a full day, from the moment I wake up, to the moment the game forces me to sleep, I can make between 3500 and 6000 money. So each try for a bonus trait eats up the equivalent of 10-100% of my daily earnings. That's asinine. Even after you've upgraded your gear and weapons all the way to max, the fights don't go quicker to any meaningful degree anyway. Enemies from the first area onward are just damage sponges that take 4-10 combos worth of damage to kill; all while dishing out run ending amounts of damage with unblock-able attacks and debilitating effects.
There is no option to increase the game speed during the portions of play where your restaurant is open. Much of your open time is going to be spent standing in one place waiting for customers to pick their items or walk up to pay. I would love the option to kick up the game speed during these times to x2 or x3.
The tutorial or journal desperately needs to be further developed. Many of the functions or features of the game are not discussed at all anywhere that I've seen. Apparently there's a way to reflect enemy attacks based on some of the bonus traits on weapons and gear, but I've never been able to figure out how. One of the traits mentions an Umami Bomb, but I've never seen or figured a way to do that either. A more diverse and useful journal or guide in your menu would be super helpful.
You can't name the business. I may have mentioned this above, but you don't get to name the restaurant. It would be such a small thing, but you're forced to keep the generic name of your parents' business: Potato Palace.
There should be an icon or emblem on each of the food items in your recipe book that indicates what cooking implement is used to make it.
Another idea for the progression system would be to allow the player to upgrade the quality of the recipes they know. That way you could avoid having to give us a menu with customization options in lieu of keeping the same system with upgraded recipe quality. Food items would ideally increase in payout based on their current quality tier. Keep the star system as well.
Honestly the game feels very superficial. Its aesthetically pleasing, but everything below the surface is lacking. It looks great and the initial feel of the game is really satisfying, but the longer you play, the more you see the gaps. If you're looking for a casual gameplay loop and pretty art I still can't recommend the game because the combat is too intense and challenging for players that like that type of game. Its like the creators of the game came up with a great concept, then outsourced the development to three different companies, none of whom talked to each other during the development.