Eleven years ago, developer David “chubigans” Galindo announced his next game. After a number of releases since becoming a full time game designer, he was going to return to a series from his freeware days: Ore no Ryomi, a pair of fan games inspired by the Japanese-only PS1 cooking game Ore no Ryouri. This was in fact his third attempt at Ore no Ryomi 3- past projects fell apart for a variety of issues, not least of all was funding. This time he was fresh off the success of The Oil Blue, an oil rig management game that saw him partnering with artist Sara Gross and composer Jonathan Geer. A recent game bundle, the Indie Royale, had provided an injection of cash, and Galindo decided this was the time to try again. He called the new project “Cook, Serve, Delicious!”
The launch some six months later was a disaster. The first weekend came and went with nothing to be optimistic about- little traffic, poor coverage, and weak sales. Down to a few hundred dollars to his name, Galindo was feeling defeated. It was in this moment that the late great Ryan Davis reached out on behalf of Giant Bomb, asking for a review copy. A few days later, Giant Bomb published their video- “Quick Look: Cook, Serve, Delicious!”
This was the beginning of the comeback story, and while Ryan Davis gave CSD the push it needed to get rolling, the credit belongs to Galindo, Gross, and Geer for shipping a delightful game- charming, fun, and utterly compelling. I bought the game within hours of seeing the Quick Look, downloading it right off the Vertigo Gaming site (the only way it was available). When it hit Steam Greenlight, I supported its release, and when it launched I bought another copy. Then I bought copies for friends. It wasn’t charity- I just believed that strongly in the joy the game brought me, and could bring others.
Cook, Serve, Delicious! 2!! hit five years later, and the rough charm of the first was replaced with what is to this day the best cooking experience any game has ever offered. New systems and considerations complicate the frenetic play to a level that pushes you toward mastery. The art and music are better than ever, the Chef For Hire campaign mode offers tailored levels with themes and distinct challenges, and all the while it begins to build a lighthearted but fascinating world through background storytelling. It also upped the challenge: the first game slowly ramped up, and by the end was pushing back on the player with a satisfying level of challenge. 2 just keeps going, and the later levels are truly punishing. The Zen Mode added in a patch that strips away all the timers isn’t just for kicks, it’s a release valve for the tension of repeated failures as the game gets harder and harder.
Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3?! lands three years after 2, pushing a full-on story mode with rival chefs, robot sous chefs filling the air with playful banter, and a full exploration of the unique apocalypse that is CSD’s world. What was once a sequence of arbitrary “days” or shifts is in 3 a road trip across a devastated America that is nevertheless lighthearted and charming. It doesn’t lose the difficulty that 2 ramped up, either- attacks from rival food trucks devastate your food prep, and incredibly complex recipes test your memory and reflexes. The final battle, a sort of Food Truck Indy 500 called the Iron Cook Speedway, pushes you to the absolute limits of your skill and tenacity.
Each game is more ambitious than the last, but also with its own distinct charms, never replacing a predecessor. The clumsy rise from a hole in the wall to a premium restaurant in 1, with food upgrades and side quests; the carefully built menu challenges of Chef For Hire in 2; the unrelenting nature of working in a food truck as opposed to a full restaurant in 3. Without question, I’d say 2 is the strongest of the series, but even with the core gameplay being so similar, if you like one you really ought to play all of them.
I’ve written articles about each game, and yet when Cook Serve Forever was announced, I was… uneasy. Absolutely, I was excited to see more great cooking gameplay, and wanted to support the gently growing studio. But David Galindo had seemed pretty… done with Cook, Serve, Delicious. He said himself that if 3 flopped, he could happily leave the series behind, and mechanically the apex remains 2, despite 3’s unique charms. Did Galindo really want to make this game, or did he feel unable to turn away from the series that so explosively propelled his career?
Here’s the secret: the title is not an accident. Galindo could have named it Cook, Serve, Delicious Forever if he wanted to. The absence of “Delicious” is pointed- Cook Serve Forever is not the same game.
Right from the jump, we have left the nameless self-insert chef of 1 through 3 behind. We’re introduced to our new lead Nori Kaga as a child, as her mother teaches her her first recipe. From there we jump forward to her as a young adult, running a food truck in the declining metropolis of Moraine. Throughout Cook, Serve, Delicious!, we’ve watched in increasing detail as the world falls apart: civil wars, robot uprisings, and more. The one constant in the world has been good food, and the love and respect the people of the world have for cooking. Now, after the dust has settled on those conflicts, the world is moving on, and rebuilding with cuisine as a central cultural obsession.
Nori is the embodiment of this obsession- named for a food, as is her girlfriend Brie, living as a struggling artist in the form of a street cook, and hero-worshiping the culinary superstar Chef Rhubarb. Finally, her passion drives her to head to the big city (Helianthus) in pursuit of restauranting greatness.
This is as far as the story goes right now- after all, Cook Serve Forever is an early access game, currently listed as Early Access Version 0.1.43. Even so, the story has been charming, punchy, and warm- your central cast of Nori and Brie as cook and assistant feel like they honestly care about each other, and their struggles feel honest to someone who’s been through the grind of poverty. The few supporting characters I’ve met have been friendly too, and the vocal performances are beyond reproach.
Perhaps most strikingly, the art team that has rendered exquisite food alongside the occasional character is suddenly showing up with some truly charismatic character designs. There’s always been a dorky charm to the deliberately bland weirdos that march through your restaurant, but there have only been two actual characters in the series to date- Whisk and Cleaver, your robot sous chefs and traveling companions in 3. The character designs in Forever bump up against the line of being a bit too soft and heartwarming for me, a lifeline pessimist, but so far the game has absolutely stuck on the right side of that line, and I’m delighted to see that their talent for drawing food is just one element of a vast skillset. While Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3?! had charming story art, it was mostly the thread tying the narrative together, rather than a centerpiece. Shoutouts as well to Jonathan Geer for another peppy earworm soundtrack- I’ve not the language to go full music critic on you, except that I have caught myself quietly singing “we don’t want the dream to end” on more than one occasion.
It is a bummer to get this far in and say that while every element framing the core action is brighter and better than ever, the cooking itself is the albatross around this game’s neck. The focus on story has been paired with much more simplified cooking mechanics, a sound idea that feels like a huge blunder in execution. What should be a relaxing of the series’ classic tense gameplay instead becomes tedious.
I’ve been a lifelong keyboard player for the series until now- the gameplay has been described as WarioWare-esque, and that spirit of frantic inputs feels great spread across the breath of a keyboard. You form associations in your brain- C is Cheese across all sorts of recipes, as is B for Bacon and O for Oil. Rapidly banging out CPV to make a peach pie is at once a world apart from tapping SRKACV to throw together a chicken pot pie, but you can still see the commonalities in the process: you gotta end by covering it with crust! Tapping out POK OK(shift)ME to cook and then dress a chicken pesto pasta uses very different ingredients than the POH RHTMP(shift)T of a shrimp and spinach pasta, but you can still see the similar technique at work!
Compare this to a recipe in Cook Serve Forever, which I’ll notate as I play.
Any Arrow Key, Anyx3, Any, Up Arrow, Any, Repeat Last Key, Any, Right Arrow, Any (Short Hold).
What was I making? It’s a delightful fried dough recipe called an Elephant Ear, tapped with cinnamon sugar and green apple slices. Not that I knew it until the very end- I was just staring at the button prompts to ensure I didn’t get tripped up by its randomized requests.
Next, we’re gonna make some jollof rice.
Any (Short Hold), Upx2, Any, Any, Anyx3, Repeat.
You know what I did? I held the Up key once, then just mashed Up until the recipe was done. Looks like I made chicken and rice, somehow? Cool. I guess.
There’s very little being expressed by the key press- the recipes ARE relatively consistent in what key combination they want, but you can only convey so much via making someone mash a key. Worse yet, there are recipes where one step involves pressing the key a random number of times. It isn’t as though once you start, it’ll tell you how many presses it wants- it just shows a series of question marks that go away on the very last press. Hope you didn’t tap it once too much and break your combo!
None of this feels like a “recipe,” just like a series of arbitrary button presses that make the game happy… but not you. It’s mindless, except that it isn’t, because the addition of randomization means you have to stare intently at the button prompts to be sure the game isn’t going to suddenly throw you for a loop on a routine recipe. Because of this, even on a recipe you should KNOW (which is remarkable, because there are so many shared buttons that every recipe feels the same to me), you can’t watch the art of the food being assembled, or look at the static image of a customer waiting for their order. There’s a whole screen of beautifully rendered food that changes with every new ingredient, as well as expertly crafted backgrounds and characters, and yet you spend your whole time staring at a tiny piece of UI and ignoring everything else. But hey, at least you’re doing it in pursuit of less fun mechanics! It is literally worse than its predecessors in every single way.
I’m not here to say Cook Serve Forever should just bring back the mechanics of CSD. Indeed, I think that’s a terrible idea- even 3 felt like it was stretching to justify its changes to what 2 perfected, though I think in the end it gets there. David Galindo is right to decide that it’s time for a new road, changing the core cooking gameplay that he and the team he’s slowly built around him have run with so far. The problem is CSF doesn’t feel like it has any real answers- it’s fine to reject the past, but you need new solutions to proceed. And even if it were greatly refined, I don’t think Forever’s current approach is worth it.
Cook Serve Forever envisions a kinder, gentler game, and this is in clear response to the series that birthed it. A glance at Cook, Serve, Delicious! 2!!’s achievements shows you just how few people saw that title’s endgame, and Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3?! achievement for getting all gold medals on the final challenge is sitting at a cool 1.4%. I’m not one of that chosen elite myself, and it’s not for lack of trying- they’re hard games. I can only imagine how frustrating it must be to do all the work Vertigo Gaming did building the story of 3 only for the overwhelming majority of your players feeling incapable of reaching its conclusion. Still, it fits the world of those games: they’re about a planet going to hell for the stupidest reasons, and then surviving for stupider reasons still.
That’s not what Forever wants to be. Forever says, past the wars, past the truces, past the rebuilding, a better world is possible. A world that is kind, a world that cares, a world that wants you to succeed. And Cook Serve Forever wants you to succeed, in a way its predecessors were open to seeing but were never willing to compromise to let you through. For my part, I want Cook Serve Forever to succeed in turn. It’s beautiful, sweet, and charming. I just wish it was any freakin’ fun to play. But that’s what Early Access is for, right? So let’s cross our fingers, and root for the team at Vertigo Gaming to pull off another classic.
It’s a big ask, of course. Cook, Serve, Delicious! 2!! went through Early Access, and underwent some large structural changes in response to player feedback. Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3?! did as well, and most of the changes were around tuning- it was in pretty good shape otherwise. In both cases, the core gameplay was rock solid: changing the things around it is far easier than reworking the very foundation of the game. It’s a test of Vertigo Gaming, a studio that David Galindo built up from nothing, and their ability to pivot. Twelve years ago, Vertigo Gaming was just Galindo, and a collection of games made to eek out a living. This is the house that corndogs built. Maybe it’s ok to have a little faith.
