In Cook Serve Delicious 3, the tower where your Cook Serve Delicious restaurant operated out of in CSD2 gets hit with a missile, something that seemed wacky and comically paradoxical in January of 2020, so you hit the road with a food truck and two robot assistants, Whisk and Cleaver. Whisk is your driver and generally nice and supportive while Cleaver rides shotgun in the original sense of the term and is more critical. This is a fun character dynamic and the line-by-line writing is good.
What I dislike is that the game is bad at seeing how well you’re doing and having Whisk and Cleaver react appropriately. Their comments seem to be based exclusively on what medal you got for the level: None if you failed completely, a bronze if you scraped by, silver for a good but imperfect run, and gold for totally flawless. Cleaver sometimes comments about how she’s really surprised if you get a gold medal, but this is informed neither by the percentage of completed levels which already have gold medals (variables that should not be hard to keep track of unless the game has severe problems with spaghetti code) nor by how many attempts this level in particular took to get a gold on (ditto, though less so). Like, the fuck do you mean you’re really surprised, Cleaver? I played CSD2, most of these recipes are carryovers, I am butchering these early levels, gold after gold on the first try. A character whose respect is difficult to earn is only compelling if they actually pay attention to and notice when you’re doing really well. It would even make sense for Cleaver to have a “don’t get cocky, this is the easy part” kind of attitude, but instead she acts like getting a perfect run is remotely surprising even though I just did fifteen of them in a row.
Whisk doesn’t escape entirely unscathed, either. Her gold medal comments make sense, she focuses a lot on how impressed she is by the achievement, but her comments on the silver medals often feel like they were supposed to be for bronze and got coded wrong or something. The Cook Serve Delicious series sets out to be the Dark Souls of food preparation games (one of the series taglines is “prepare to dine”), and I think that attitude may have leaked too much into Whisk, who is supposed to be the kind and supportive one of the duo. Particularly I’m thinking of a line she has in a silver medal that goes something like “I know you’re trying, chef, but maybe next time try a little harder?” And Cleaver adds “or a lot harder.” This dialogue makes sense for a bronze medal, but for a silver you’d expect Whisk’s answer to be more along the lines of “wow, nearly perfect, you’re almost there!”
I’m not sure what the dialogue is like on bronze medals or failed levels, because I’ve got none of either so far (the game is divided up between eleven “territories” across the post-apocalyptic United States and I’m partway through the third, so getting all golds and silvers so far isn’t a huge accomplishment), but I’m honestly not sure how Whisk could get much more critical without breaking character as the kind and supportive one completely, considering that a bronze is still a success.
I wonder if this is driven by the fact that you can get bronze and silver medals on Zen Mode, which disables the timers (you can still mess up an order by pressing the wrong button, but you have as much time as you need to prepare the recipe), but not the gold medal? The developer has discussed in a news update that Zen Mode was added to CSD2 in a bit of a panic and they were never really happy with it, so I suspect they may still think of it as a “fake” game mode that served as a band-aid solution to a problem that deserved more time than was available, and that came through in the writing. That’s a guess, but it reflects my experience of playing the game.
Chamomile Has A Blog 