The Cooking Game

My first instinct when I loaded up The Cooking Game was to treat it like a light strategy puzzle: read the upgrade tree, optimise the kitchen layout, build toward the harder restaurants. That plan lasted about two sessions before the game's shallow decision space became obvious. This is a free-to-play mobile port, originally from 2016, and it plays exactly like one. The structure follows a familiar time-management loop. You prepare dishes for impatient customers, bank the tips, and spend them on kitchen and interior upgrades across eight distinct restaurant types: American fast food, a Chinese wok-to-walk spot, Italian pasta and pizza, Japanese sushi, Arabic shawarma, Indian curry, a Mexican burrito stand, and a dessert-and-candy shop. Early levels across each venue move from trivially easy into modestly demanding as customer patience shrinks and order complexity grows. The sushi and Italian restaurants are where the game's difficulty ceiling actually shows up, requiring tighter timing than the burger-and-fries opening acts suggest. On paper that is a reasonable progression arc. In practice, the 300-plus levels pad the number rather than meaningfully deepen the decision-making. The upgrade economy is the closest this game gets to a loop worth caring about. Spending earned coins on faster ovens, better prep tools, and interior decoration does produce tangible speed improvements, and there are bonus-cash mechanics scattered across levels that reward clean service chains. What is missing is any meaningful choice architecture. Every upgrade path leads to the same endpoint, there are no build trade-offs, and the kitchen layout is fixed per restaurant. Compare that to something like Cook, Serve, Delicious! - which forces genuine multitask prioritisation - and The Cooking Game's decision layer looks thin. Community reports also flag persistent bugs: a level-selection crash past stage 12 in the first restaurant and occasional dual-monitor blackouts during the upgrade screen are the most cited issues, and neither appears fully resolved. Steam's all-time review score sits at mixed, around 59 percent positive from roughly 214 reviews. Who is this actually for? Younger players or complete genre newcomers who want a low-stakes introduction to time-management cooking before committing to something like Overcooked or Cooking Simulator will find the early restaurants perfectly digestible. The Steam Workshop tag suggests mod support exists, though community output is minimal. Achievements, trading cards, cloud saves, and leaderboards round out the feature list without adding real replayability. The in-app purchase system is present, inherited from the mobile version, and worth knowing about before you assume everything unlocks through play alone. If you run a colour-coded spreadsheet of your idle game upgrade paths or expect genuine resource trade-offs in your sims, this will run dry fast. The game respects complete beginners and nobody else.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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