What’s For Dinner?
Everyday I am exposed to the same line of self-inflicted questions; what’s for dinner? What should I have for breakfast? Do I have the right ingredients? Is this even something I have the culinary skills to make? Surely, those who do not have a fondness for cooking can relate, to why these questions are exhausting and how thinking about the topic for too long, can bring you to the conclusion that a bag of chips will do just as well as a roast – which in my case, happens more often than i should be willing to admit.
However, I also know that until the day comes, where a pill with enough nutrition, and the taste of pepperoni pizza, will substitute cooking, I will not be able to avoid these daily struggles. The worst part is, that when a decision has finally been made, it is followed by a 1.5 hour disastrous kitchen showdown and a 30 min cleaning extravaganza, all to satisfy the basic need of “not starving to death”. The need, which all in all takes up a 15 min time-span of inhaling the end-result to satisfy, just to be finalized in a 7 min toilet expose – my point being, too much effort for too little enjoyment.
Despite my own argumentation, I would say the problem mostly lies in the aspect of cooking for myself – and before you mention food prep, planning, pre-cooked, etc. It has all been tried and none have brought me more joy than the other. Yet, when it comes to cooking with or for others, I am completely on board – whether your sous chef is a ninja within the culinary world or should be called an “idiot Sandwich” by Mr. Ramsay, it is just more enjoyable! It becomes a social activity instead of a chore, all of a sudden you will be keeping more people alive, instead of just yourself and you will forever have the memory of when you gave your entire family food poisoning, the day before going to Legoland.
Just to highlight that the struggle is rather well known, WNYC Studios released an article mentioning that “90% of Americans either hate cooking or feel lukewarm about it”! Nonetheless, this only seems to be the case when it comes to throwing a steak on the grill in real life, compared to doing it virtually! You see, a game named Overcooked 2, which has racked in 17+ mio in revenue, proves the opposite.
With that in mind, I think it would be fun to discuss the realizations that I have made through cooking and to whether they are realistically portrayed in Overcooked 2 – while highlighting a few, probably well known, cooking tips I have made throughout time.
Overcooked 2
Overcooked 2 (that is right, not just one game were made) was released in 2018, as a chaotic co-op cooking game for 1-4 players in which you must serve a variety of recipes including sushi, pasta, cakes, burgers and burritos to hungry customers in a myriad of crazy environments – developed by Ghost Town Games Ltd., Team 17.
The concept is fun and simple – prepare the ordered dish and serve enough customers, before time runs out – oh and then of course, one must do so without burning down the kitchen, cleaning the dishes, evading moving counters, and try not to verbally insult your teammate beyond socially acceptable standards.
The Plot
So the plot – We have throughout our gaming career saved a few princesses, a kingdom or two, and probably the world just for shits and giggles – but this time the Onion Kingdom is in peril!
The Onion King (a man of many layers) has been reading aloud from the fabled “Necro-nomnom-icon”, and as such cooked up a whole new problem in the form of an Undead Bread army called – wait for it – “The Unbread”. You, the player, and your most trusted companions, will need to chop, fry, and bake their way through all-new crazy kitchens to defeat this new foe and save the kingdom.
How Is This Relevant?
You remember when I mentioned that cooking for others was of interest to me? Well cooking for zombie bread, with your friends, tick all the boxes and so much more! The pressure to finish the dishes in the correct order, prior to running out of time, and doing so with a sous chef who cannot chop an onion right is the epitome of exciting cooking!
Man, this game makes me want to set the egg timer, invite my family over and prepare 5 peculiar courses at the same time before they get here – and i would do so, if not for the impending fear of salmonella and the abnormal wrath from my partner when the kitchen looks like a scene from “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs”.
ANYWAY! Let’s get cooking
Gameplay
With that in mind – The general gameplay is about moving the right ingredients around the kitchen, slicing and dicing, cooking, and serving them to your expectant customers. Some recipes simply need to be cut up, others need to be cooked, mixed, or combined with other ingredients. Sounds easy enough right? If not for the various cooking apparatuses most often being placed inconveniently around the kitchen – for example, your pots can be on the other side of a canyon, where the floors are rotating based on a time interval – it simulates the same feeling as when guests have emptied your dishwasher and just thrown the stuff wherever space was found.
With each service of a successfully cooked meal, the player will be rewarded with points and these lead to potential of earning stars – the end goal is to have 3 stars for each level. This sounds like fair play, however, this goal comes close to unattainable, when combined with the tight time limit, excessive recipes and in my case, a surprisingly bad hand to eye coordination…
As if this was not challenging enough, you will need to be in sync with your partner and assist each other in not leaving something on the burner too long, as not only your food will be “toast” (ba dum tsh), but your kitchen will also burst into flames – and let us be honest, despite the provided fire extinguisher, putting out the flame and serving my three layered cake, can be hard to prioritize.
Once you beat the campaign, you can then unlock the fourth star for each level. Not many things have brought me to tears throughout my life, but this star is definitely on my list of traumatic events.
Luckily, you get to cook in amazing environments and changing surroundings, while throwing food through your kitchen with no “real” consequences – and to be honest, it feels great accomplishing dishes in overcooked, which I never in my wildest dreams would be able to do in my personal life – like al dente pasta.
Debate Of The Day
This brings us to today’s discussion – cooking in reality vs Overcooked. Now just to state the obvious, overcooked, from the start, leaves out some of the most frustrating parts of cooking – which to most would be 1. finding out what to cook and 2. shopping for the ingredients.
Meaning, you have to bring yourself past these struggles prior to making the meal and focus only on the excruciating task of preparing, cooking and serving the dish! As a side bonus, the dinner guests in overcooked does not care about taste, so no need to worry about “why it is to spicy”, “why you did not add enough salt” or “why your lasagna is with vegetables and bacon, instead of traditional” – BECAUSE SUSAN! THAT IS HOW I LIKE IT!
Not to mention that overcooked is on time – so you do not have the luxury to re-read the recipe 500 times or call your mom for help, and neither do you have the possibility to look up youtube videos with the “top 5 best ways of preparing asparagus” – so you better strap in, because the “unbread” is not gonna feed itself!
Finally, that means we will be looking more in detail to the prep and dish itself – and how to minimize kitchen fires, burned rice, moving kitchen equipment and cooking priority, while trying not to execute your sou-chef for forgetting the salad. Now if that does not sound like a stress free time, then I do not know what is!
Cooking With A Friend
As mentioned above, cooking alone can be quite tedious and often just a task, sprung for your basic need of survival. Whereas, cooking with a friend or for a friend is a completely different scenario! Providing nutrition to another individual than just yourself, for some reason just sparks more joy – whether it is to show off your culinary skills or have a laugh on behalf of the bun that is burnt on the outside and fluid on the inside, it is simply a different experience.
I even dare say that cooking in a smaller kitchen with another person is the best cooperation test one can find! Do you chop, while he rinses? should she go left and you go right? Did you use the chopping board for chicken and she for vegetables? Do you know engage the risk of getting salmonella? Coordination becomes key my friend, so strap in and prepare to learn who wears the pants in the kitchen!
The exact same can be said for Overcooked! The kitchen with moving furniture and strategically illogical placement of ingredients, offers a similar environment to a kitchen in a 1 room apartment, with a row of tasks that has to be well coordinated if you want to prepare the dish in due time! You can try and do it alone, but it is nothing compared to taking on the co-op function of the game with a partner or a friend.
It is surprising how fast you fall into the roles of “who chops”, “who cooks”, “who serves”, and “who washes” – meaning that for the first 1.5 min. you feel like a total legend, which quickly is distorted by the first kitchen fire and you are transitioned into a disarray of fire, dirty dishes, and your partner panically throwing radishes at your face, while trying to grab a plate which 0.00001 inch away from where you character can actually reach it.
Hence, the co-op function in overcooked provides a very lifelike scenario of what it can feel like to be sharing a kitchen and preparing a meal with your equally oblivious friend. You will have a lot of laughs, post the traumatic events of you burning the mushrooms and your partner painstakingly chopping 16 cucumbers instead of carrots. However, just as in real life, following a few tries and – remember this part- a lot of open constructive communication, reaching a perfect will is achievable.
Hazardous Seasoning
Now even though it may be achievable, that does not mean it comes without certain learnings along the way. For starters, despite how great of a masterchef you believe to have become, I bet your “Victorinox Fibrox 8-Inch Chef’s Knife” has made you drop a tear, in more ways than just cutting through an onion or two.
Contrarily, overcooked provides a completely safe experience, where you can chop any vegetable in 3 seconds, without fearing for your limbs! Even the flames arising from your over boiled pasta (not a typo) or the meteors falling from the sky cannot hurt you. Does it provide you with a more unsafe and darring mindset when playing? Well yes, but who has not wanted to try and run full speed across a path that could sink into lava at any given moment, while carrying a plate of Chicken Alfredo.
Despite the obvious conclusion that reality is less “child friendly”, it cannot be denied that it brings the option for more variety. Seasoning is the magic of cooking, which provides the option to make every dish more exciting and personal. Now that is hardly the case for overcooked, where each round provides you with a fixed set of ingredients and a minimum amount of dishes to serve – if one customer likes their carbonara with less mushrooms or more salt, well that is simply to bad – you will receive the most vanilla version of the dish you offered!
In general that matches quite well, since it would be an understatement to call your Overcooked customers picky – as long as they get the dish they ordered, on time, then it does not matter that you and your partner have dropped, kicked and slightly burned every single ingredient prior to serving it.
At the end of the day, is this not what we are all looking for in an everyday meal? Something that resembles an edible dish, which has not been too burned, over seasoned, or served too late? You personally might have higher standards than this, but then neither my kitchen nor that of overcooked is a place for you to go.
That F*@xing Sink
Speaking of an everyday meal, that also brings the everyday dirty dishes. Now in the game, the cleaning is fairly simple, but nonetheless a major annoyance – reason being, that just like in real life, if you do not clean the dishes then you will not have anything to serve your food on (I know, I know, we all skip a few corners in real life, but not here) and without anything to serve on, then there are no way to win the round.
However, there are two major differences, 1. you only have four dishes, but 100 guests and 2. the f*@xing sink is often located in rather complicated places. To top it off, unloading the sink cannot be done in bulk, meaning that despite your busy schedule of being a world renowned chef, you have to run back and forth to the sink, grabbing one plate at a time.
That being said, it really is the only cleaning you have to do! You can throw any ingredient to your partner at full speed, with no intention of her catching it, and nothing will happen. The melon will not create a jackson pollock upon hitting the walls, the potato cannot shatter on to the floors and your pots will not leave burn marks on the counter – could you imagine that in real life? Whenever I take my eye off the pot with boiling water, it immediately runs all over my stove and takes 20 min to clean up, whereas my microwave looks like the room of any crime scene after reheating tomato soup.
A Virtual Course Or An Actual Dish
With these final realizations, it is not hard to understand Overcooked’s astounding sales numbers, despite people’s real life interest in cooking.
It not only encourages cooperation and communication, it is also insanely fun – whereas, some would refer to our own meal prep as quite a chore. Nonetheless, most do enjoy eating, so the trade-off between a virtual course and an actual dish, is quite significant – luckily, no one says you cannot do both.
How Do You Cook?
I reckon it is very clear I am not a Master Chef, neither in my own kitchen or the one in Overcooked – but that might not be the same for you! Feel free to brag about the dish you are a champion in making and test your knowledge in a quick quiz!
All right, I guess that is all I got in me for today – Thank you for reading this far and feel free to provide any feedback you may have – We would like for you to keep leveling up with us! Feel free to contribute your own content, such as fan art, game reviews, or personal gaming stories, to be featured as Pixelated Wisdom.
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Hi Micheal,
Thank you for the awesome comment – I am happy to hear that my hours gaming is not completely wasted! Hopefully it won’t require you 3 hours the next time you want to browse for something worth reading. If you got any suggestions for our next topic, then feel free to send it this way and I will do my best to accommodate.
Have a great day!