▲ Recommended
33 hrs
A month ago, if you told me that I'd stop playing Baldur's Gate 3 for weeks because I got too absorbed in a $4 restaurant running fangame from a franchise I wasn't really into before, I would have thought you were joking. But this game rules. Charming, addicting, the perfect short burst structure for a Steam Deck, and you don't need to know a damn thing about Touhou to get into it. And it's a fantastic return on the low price.
189 found helpful
Steam ↗
▲ Recommended
100 hrs
Don't really know much about the Touhou series other than a couple characters and some of the music, but I'd recommend this game even if you don't.
The basic premise seems to be a fantasy world where humans and different types of monsters live. Some humans and all monsters appear to have some sort of special ability they can use. The main character is a sparrow monster that runs a little food cart in the mountains with one of her friends. The game starts with them both opening a restaurant and a particularly angry ghost shows up, demands a bunch of food all at once, and then trashes the place after getting impatient. Time then goes back a few months to when you're just running your food cart in the mountains. You get roped into taking on several debts and start running your izakaya
The gameplay consists of day and night phases. During the day you can buy ingredients, forage for ingredients in each location, or talk to the inhabitants of the area. Some inhabitants will have quests for you to do for them, others are what are called "rare guests". These people have a friendship level and at each milestone will teach you a new recipe and a request to serve that recipe to them. Talking to them once a day increases friendship, but the best way to raise friendship is during the night phase when your restaurant is open. Maxing out friendship levels can get you some nice benefits, so it can be worth it to hang around an old area til you finish making friends with everyone before moving on to the next one. One of the first rare guests you meet will also upgrade your Izakaya so that you can have more guests and cooking space. Another shopkeeper you meet later on can upgrade your cooking equipment.
During the night phase, you choose workers to help you. You'll only really have one at the start, but you'll get more as you get further into the game. You can also choose to work alone, as helpers take a small cut of each night's pay as well. Each helper can be set to serve drinks, serve meals, or help cook. You can have up to three helping out and can put every single one on serve drinks if you really want to.
When you open your izakaya each night, you pick a menu for guests to choose from. You can put a set amount of meals and a set amount of drinks. Then you pick your cooking equipment for the night as well. The basic food cart can't hold every type, so you'll want to make sure your menu isn't too diverse at first. Once you've finished your setup, the izakaya opens and customers can start showing up. Each customer has a preference for type of food they like so they'll tend to order that food more often than others, but they'll always pick something from your set menu. They are pretty simple to deal with, you pick the menu item and drink they want and serve it to them before they run out of patience. The game is very generous on customer patience, and I've never seen it even reach halfway on the meter.
The more complex orders come from the rare guests that live in each region. Rare guests don't really know what food or drink they want, they just want something with a specific taste. They have a variety of flavors they like, but will only ever tell you one of them at a time. This is where you start to customize your cooking. Every single ingredient you have can be added to a menu item. The most basic food item rice ball just consists of seaweed(Where she gets the rice from, who knows). That leaves 4 slots of ingredients open for customization. Riceballs are vegetarian, cheap, and taste like homecooking. One of the characters, Reimu, loves these flavors, but if she requests something sweet for example, the plain riceball is going to be good for her, but it won't get the best rating since it doesn't have what she requested. So I can make a riceball, and with one of the four other ingredient slots I can add honey to make the riceball also taste sweet. Getting the best food rating on rare guests comes with a bonus. They will use their own special power to provide a buff for you for a time. For example the first few rare guests will give you random meat items, random fish items, or increase the likelihood of guests appearing for a time. Likewise, giving a rare guest a dish that they absolutely hate will have them use their power to punish you. Scaring away guests, restricting your cooking ability, or simply stealing ingredients from your pantry.
After a set time, the shop will close for the night and show you a tally of everything you've sold and the money you made for the day.
Now your character also can buff themselves while cooking too. For the first couple days you'll have fairly basic operations, but eventually your character will start to sing while cooking as well. This takes the form of a very small rythm minigame that provides notes on beat with the music of the area. These are very simple and are actually very generous. Sometimes you won't even see a note pop up. Each time you sing while cooking you can buff yourself. These can come in the form of unlimited patience for guests for a time. Guests finishing meals immediately. And the ability to throw food and drinks to a table without having to walk to them. If you have all three buffs, they combine into a super buff called hyper mode and reset the buff timer to full. In hyper mode, you no longer get the rythm minigame, and certain cooking utensils actually have special functions while you're in it.
Daily restaurant openings are actually fairly simple and relaxing compared to most other cooking games. However there is a story in the game that pushes you to certain challenges. There's a time limit to pay off your weekly debt until you get to the last part of the main story. Once you get to the end of the main story, it halts until you decide to take on the final challenge. And while I've mentioned the game is fairly simple and relaxing, this final challenge is an actual challenge and becomes quite hectic. You get minichallenges throughout the main story that give you an idea of what it will be like, but they aren't quite the same as the real thing. And while I enjoy the basic gameplay loop, I really like the challenge that came with this and the end of each of the DLCs.
The game's artstyle works well for it, nothing really seemed incongruent when I played and there definitely seems like some good care went into making the environments. The music, like the bits of touhou music I've heard before, is very good and gives each area its own unique feel to it. In particular the final challenge music while sounding somber and dire really fit well in its context in the game.
The story was easy to follow, even without knowing who these chars were, the game did well in explaining in the world and each characters place in it. It did well in selling the main story beat of a conflict that only a master chef could resolve.
Definitely recommend this game if it sounds at all interesting to you. Its fairly cheap. I got 100 hours total from the base game and the three DLCs that were out at the time of this review. There is a fourth one on the way that I will probably pick up when it gets translated. If you like the base game, each of the DLCs adds 2 new zones with 3 rare guests each and a challenge at the end similar to the end of the base game. Each of the challenges work well with altering what you know about how the game works. They all felt pretty fun with DLC3 in particular giving you a challenge for those that want more on the rythm minigame side of things, though it also adds a cool new cooking challenge too where you get to play as other characters that have their own set of buffs different from Mystia's.
