This latest entry from Vertigo Gaming Inc. promises a feature-rich culinary adventure for players seeking both challenge and narrative depth.

It fails so severely as a cooking game I don't even know what I am cooking 99% of the time because the only thing I am looking at is the bottom 2 inches of the screen for what buttons to mash.

Along the way you'll earn stickers for completing tasks and challenges. Check out your Cookbook to view your growing sticker collection, and hey, maybe your inner completionist will want to collect them all?

Your quest for culinary greatness will take you and your food cart to over 50 locations throughout the city of Helianthus. Each location has its own menu and set of cooking objectives. For instance, you’ll serve pizza to burnt-out game developers at a video game studio, and old-timey eats at the city’s historic district.

Hey everyone! Lots of great announcements and exciting news coming down the pipeline, so let’s dive in!

If you want to play a cooking mama clone with almost pelo difficulty wearing the skin of the series that it has murdered this is your game.  

It’s fairly grindy if you want to maximize everything and get cem% achievements, yet I find it a very enjoyable grind because of the excellent soundtrack and overall presentation.

Chop, stir, and sauté your way through the bustling solarpunk city of Helianthus. You play as Nori Kaga, a food cart chef aspiring to make it big like her role model, the Culinary Queen, Chef Rhubarb. Alongside your partner Brie, you'll cook over 80 foods and master more than 400 different recipes.

At the moment of writing this review, the game is in Early Access, but the content available is already fully playable and bug-free. As of October 2023, a prologue and two chapters have been released, totaling around 5 hours of gameplay, and another two chapters are planned to be added in the future. In comparison to the series, mastering cooking recipes is not the central focus anymore, and the gameplay is considerably simplified. Fulfilling orders is now done by correctly inputting QTE sequences and thus building up a combo score by pressing the arrow buttons as indicated on the screen, with some of the elements having extra modifiers to make the gameplay not so trivial.

The original required a combination of reading comprehension, typing dexterity and good time management. Managing multiple tickets at once (especially with the implementation of holding stations in later games) made you feel the stress of being behind the pass.

The goal was to maintain the more accessible relaxed vibes of the initial version while allowing players accustomed to the fast pace of previous titles to challenge themselves. As such, you can now prepare two items at once.

A spiritual sequel to 2013 hit Cook, Serve, Delicious, players must cook their way through a bustling solarpunk city as they work their way from a food cart chef to the culinary queen.

What’s nice in all this is that the player has the flexibility of choosing how difficult the gameplay should be, as some of the upgrades you can choose in-between shifts do not add any challenge factors although opting in for one of these will make you miss out on the XP you would otherwise get.

I just want to take a COOK SERVE FOREVER Gameplay moment to thank everyone for all of their support through what I would consider the roughest Early Access period we've ever had.