Review: Cuisineer (Nintendo Switch) – Pure Nintendo

Blending entrepreneurial spirit with adventure, Cuisineer challenges you to manage the day-to-day running of a restaurant while also dungeon crawling for ingredients. The game utilises an adorable art style and bright, bold colour scheme to create a cosy atmosphere.

You play as Pom, an adventurer who takes on the responsibility of her parents’ restaurant while they travel the world. You source ingredients for food and materials for furniture and upgrades by venturing into nearby dungeons to fight delicious monsters. It’s not difficult to fall into a routine that allows you to run errands around town, open your restaurant for a chunk of the day and get out into the dungeons before it gets too late.

You meet various characters who will help you thrive. A carpenter upgrades your restaurant and builds new furniture. A smith upgrades your weapons. A cafe offers experimental boba drinks that act as health potions and stat boosts in the dungeons. Visiting traders come to town to sell clothing and decorations for your restaurant that make it more attractive to different customers.

The community offers missions you can undertake, usually in the form of collecting specific ingredients, materials or cooked dishes in exchange for a recipe to add to your menu. These encourage you to explore new areas and think about where you might find new items. The stories you’re told when you are given these quests build the Cuisineer world around you, creating backstories for the townsfolk. Some tasks show the community growing with your influence—for instance, helping two characters develop their relationship by bringing them things to impress each other. However, there are far more of them that don’t tie too much into the other tales you hear, so it does feel like there’s room to build on those stories to create a more cohesive sense of the neighbourhood.

Shortly after you arrive, you are approached by a tax collector who informs you that your parents have failed to make a number of payments. This offers motivation to grow your restaurant and make plenty of profit to pay down your debt. However, there is no deadline, so there is very little tension driving you to pay rather than use your money on other things.

Each time you pay off a set chunk of money, you unlock a new dungeon to explore, beginning with a simple, leafy woodland and ranging through lava pits, an icy wasteland and a toxic swamp. The dungeons change each time you visit, using familiar blocks of scenery to create randomly generated maps across multiple floors. Each environment features different enemies as well as different types of trees and rocks you cut down for materials. You have to return to each area repeatedly to ensure you have plenty of ingredients for your most popular dishes and materials for whatever upgrades you want to purchase.

The combat is not particularly difficult. The monsters you encounter have creative designs, ranging from chickens, cows and crabs inspired by real animals to rice sprites and violent sentient trees that are pure fantasy. The most challenging the dungeons get is when lots of enemies converge on you in wave upon wave, making it hard to avoid attacks from all angles. Boss battles feature in later floors, with a final boss fight at the end. These are decently challenging the first time you encounter them, but do have noticeable patterns you can exploit to strategise against them.

As you upgrade your restaurant, you gain space for more fridges and chests to store your loot. You can buy and upgrade new restaurant equipment. The more advanced your equipment, the more elaborate meals you can make (as long as you have the ingredients) and the more money you can earn. You can open your restaurant for as much of the day as you like. There are three key points during the day when you’re likely to get a rush of customers: at lunch, tea and dinner time. On festive days, customers will be more likely to order a specific dish and you’ll get a festive rush all day.

The gameplay while your restaurant is open is simple. People arrive, you cook the dish they order and take their payment. Some customers expect to be served, especially when you are popular enough to attract nobility. There is a countdown for how long each customer will tolerate waiting if you don’t deliver a meal, but it’s long enough that it almost never reaches the point that they storm out enraged. Clear markers show you what tasks are in your queue. Even when your restaurant has grown quite large, it’s not difficult to keep all your plates spinning comfortably.

When you have paid off all your tax debt, you are challenged to join the Cuisineers. You must pay an exorbitant entrance fee, then compete in the Cooking Arena against three opponent chefs. The final contests blend the combat against monsters with serving dishes to three judges within a set time limit. There is an element of luck to how well you will perform, as there’s no way of knowing ahead of time if you’ll get the ingredients you need for the dishes the judges will request. Whether you succeed or not, you are free to continue to harvest ingredients in the dungeons and expand your restaurant indefinitely.

Cuisineer is a relaxing game. There is very little tension to the missions given the lack of hard deadlines. There isn’t a terribly deep story, more a simple meander through the community at whatever pace suits you. Neither the restaurant management nor the dungeon combat are especially difficult, but they’re easy to sink into when you want to feel the satisfaction of growth without too much resistance. There are certainly some elements of the game that could be tweaked to elevate the experience, but the choices that have been made nonetheless feel intentionally geared towards creating the cosiness at the heart of the game.