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Creative... but no cooking., December 12, 2023 Creative Cooking is a relatively short parser, with minimal puzzles, set in a fantasy world. Your goal is to gather ingredients to complete the different dishes planned for the dinner with your friends. The game files include a walkthrough.
The game warns out ahead of time it is a sneak peek at a much larger WIP to be released in a few years. And it is the sneakiest of peeks. A short, homey, and low-stake peek into a fantastical world. There is both little and quite a bit inside this game, which makes reviewing a bit perplexing… it is both under- and over-cooked.
First, there is little in terms of gameplay. Unlike the title and blurb implies, there is no actual cooking in this game (to my grand disappointment ;-;), though you are tasked to gather ingredients for the dishes you plan to whip up. This fetch quest takes you around your little quaint town, where you either need to talk to some NPC to get an ingredient, or pick it up yourself. Get all of them, go home, and… you’re done. Depending on your movements, you may be done in 20min or so (which is fine, we don’t need just epic stories with masterful puzzles!)… or explore a bit more, and you’ll double/triple that time.
But that exploration was pretty limited, due to the very few interactive elements coded. Each “room” comes with a lengthy description, often shining light on a handful of elements standing in that spot… though only a dozen or so items (from the 25 rooms) can actually be examined. You have a secret underground closet, but can’t snoop inside. There’s a bench in the park, but you can’t sit on it. Mentions of plants, but won’t learn more about them either. I think I spent more of my time running around the game trying to interact with things… unnecessarily because there’s nothing to do with them. And for the amounts of rooms available, it’s a bit disappointing…
As well, then you do have an action coded, there is often only one way to do it, which may not even be mentioned in the About section of the game. I had to open the walkthrough to find that solution, because it was kind of obtuse you needed to throw it.
On the other hand, it’s clear the author put a lot of time into shaping up the world of this game/teaser. As mentioned before, the room descriptions are fairly lengthy (for a parser), revealing quite a bit about the town, or introducing fantasy concept (yay for new made-up words). Yet, the library room is the clearest example of that, with the different tomes available, providing exposition for the world and what might be to come. It is the real teaser about the universe of this whole WIP project…
But it’s easy to miss, since the main puzzle doesn’t require it.
I do wonder if the time spent on the whole worldbuilding and those details could have been maybe spent on the more puzzle/interactive aspect of this teaser. Still, there is an endearing aspect to this entry, short as it was, even if the implementation didn’t quite follow what you’d expect of the parser recipe. Yet, it made for an intriguing amuse-bouche…