As a disabled gamer, I don’t have the luxury of playing a ton of real-time games, so I treasure the ones I can enjoy. Cook Serve Delicious!, and its sequels (the appropriately named Cook Serve Delicious! 2!! and Cook Serve Delicious! 3?!) are some of my favorite games where the clock is on and the pressure is high. They remind me of treasured afternoons playing Papa’s Freezeria when I should’ve been using Coolmath Games to learn math. So when I heard the devs at Vertigo Gaming were releasing a new installment in the series, Cook Serve Forever, I bought it as soon as it released in early access.
To my surprise, Cook Serve Forever was a serious departure from Cook Serve Delicious. While Cook Serve Delicious and its successors were typing games first and foremost, encouraging blisteringly fast touch typing and memorization of the ‘words’ that make up complex recipes, Cook Serve Forever is a rhythm game that feels designed for controllers, with an almost roguelike-inspired drafting system for new challenges. Rather than sculpting a menu with different traits creating complex strategies, foods feel same-y, barely differentiated from each other and available at what feels like random. I played for an evening and walked away feeling incredibly frustrated, my fingers too slow and my muscle memory useless.
But wait–I don’t like rhythm games. Maybe CSF just isn’t for me. So I brought the matter to someone way more skilled at CSD, and at rhythm games, than I was. I recommended the game to my friend (let’s call her M), expecting her to be on board with the idea. Combining a favorite franchise with a favorite genre has to be a win, right?
Turns out, M took my recommendation the exact opposite way. She let me know she’d probably skip out on buying, or even trying, the game. And she let me know something that’s stuck with me ever since she said it six months ago:
no I hate that
M
i want to play csd because it is a typing game
I already have rhythm games
The typical wisdom is that expanding a franchise into new territory is a great way to bring fans of that genre into the fold. If they don’t love your game as an RPG, offer it as a roguelike. If they’re not having fun with a card game, try match-3. Once they love the setting and characters, maybe they’ll be willing to try the originals. But here we have the total opposite. M loves the franchise, loves the genre, and hates the combination.
Thinking this over, I wonder if this isn’t why I reacted so poorly to my original experience. I had been playing games that were at the pinnacle of their genre. In my opinion, there’s no typing game better than the CSD series, and that will be true if I never open CSF again. But when I opened CSF, I was suddenly playing a clunky rhythm game, and it was hard to find the motivation to keep going. Like M, if I wanted to play a rhythm game, I could look to a developer that had devoted itself to the genre. If I wanted to play CSD, I could play the other great games I already owned. Instead of my interest in either combining to make me enthusiastic about the combination, that interest dragged me away.
Now that’s not to say those who aren’t the best shouldn’t try at all. Like with evolution, striving to find your perfect niche is the best way to survive. Even if you can’t be the best rhythm game, maybe you can be the best rhythm cooking game, and if you can’t be that, maybe you can be the rhythm cooking game with the most compelling story. But when you’re already the best, and you veer off course to be just okay in another genre, that’s where the pain starts.
We’ve seen that, in the right circumstances, the best game in a genre can keep growing forever without really changing what it is at its core. Names like Minecraft, Dungeons and Dragons, Magic the Gathering, Dominion, Madden NFL, The Sims, Candy Crush, and more survive by staying in their niches and expanding on a genius original idea. Cook Serve Delicious could have done the same, expanding into DLC with new locations, new foods, or even new modes like multiplayer based on the tight and enjoyable core gameplay loop they had already established. Instead, the face of the franchise right now is a lackluster implementation of something that’s been perfected elsewhere, and that’s a real problem.
Let’s not be entirely negative though–there were elements of Cook Serve Forever that I found to be great fun. Three good things about Cook Serve Forever: The story was so good that I would happily watch let’s plays to experience everything it had to offer, the art is fun and the UI reasonably solid, and from what I was able to reach the game expands on the fascinatingly weird lore of the CSD universe. I wanted badly to enjoy CSF as a game, so I could experience everything it had to offer as a story, but I think it may never be more than a visual novel to me. I’ll still be waiting with bated breath, though, for Cook Serve Delicious! 4‽, if it ever comes around.