Overcooked! 2 - Campfire Cook Off

The first thing this one asks for is not reflexes. It asks for another person, ideally one sitting on the same couch, and a willingness to be shouted at about onions for eight minutes straight. Give it that and it hands back one of the cleanest cooperative designs on PC. Withhold it, play alone, and you get a game that functions but never quite sings. I say this as someone whose usual beat is one-person narrative games with piano soundtracks and long silences. This is the loudest thing in my library and I keep going back to it, because the craft sitting underneath all that noise is unusually careful. The loop is simple enough to explain in one breath and impossible to execute calmly. Orders arrive on a ticket rail with a timer attached. You chop, fry, boil, plate, deliver, then scrub the dishes stacking up while you are already doing four other things. Every station is a bottleneck and every second spent walking is a second not spent cooking. The camping setting is more than a coat of paint on the same tidy kitchen. Levels sprawl outdoors across firepits, tents and open ground, and the layouts keep shifting under you in ways that punish anyone who memorised a route instead of learning to improvise. Throwing ingredients across a gap stops being a party trick and becomes a survival skill within a level or two. Scoring runs to three stars, and the third star is where the actual game lives. What I admire most is the legibility. Everything you need to read, you read at a glance: what is burning, what is plated, who is holding the tomato and standing in the wrong doorway. That clarity is invisible design labour, and it is the reason every failure feels like your fault rather than the camera's. The pacing knows when to stop, too. Rounds run short by design, and the whole thing is built for a sitting that ends before anybody gets bored or genuinely furious. The music is bright, looping and faintly unhinged, doing exactly what a soundtrack in a timed game should do: raising your pulse without asking for your attention. Four players can share one screen, or you can run it online, and Remote Play Together lets one owner pull in friends who do not have a copy. Controller support is solid, which matters when both thumbs are busy. Where it disappoints is mostly a question of who is holding the controllers. Solo play gives you two chefs and a swap button, which converts a game about communication into a game about self-inflicted logistics. It works. It is not the point. Online co-op is real and welcome, but something measured in half-seconds is unforgiving about a bad connection, and the gap between a laggy run and a clean one is not subtle. There is a competitive versus mode as well, and it is a fun side dish rather than a reason to pick this up. Then the honest caveat: this is camping-themed content built on a chassis you either loved or bounced off years ago. New kitchens, new pressure points, same fundamental argument with your friends. If that argument was never fun for you, the campfire will not change your mind. So it comes down to your living room, not your hardware. This is worth your evening if you have people: a partner, a sibling, a flatmate, a group chat that will actually show up on a Thursday. It is one of the very few games I can hand to someone who does not play games and watch them understand it inside a minute, and also one I can hand to a scoring obsessive who will happily spend three hours shaving four seconds off a run. Play it in short sittings. Stop while everyone is still laughing.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

Be the first to comment on Overcooked! 2 - Campfire Cook Off.