One that caught my eye straight away was the whimsically punctuated Cook, Serve, Delicious! 2!!, a restaurant sim and time management cooking game. With typing elements. One of the nicest things about the CSD games is the food itself. Each finished dish is a lovely little heap of colour that looks as nice as fake food looks in adverts. I wish I could make cinnamon eggy bread as pretty as nice as the syrupy French toast in Cook, Serve, Delicious! 2!!. Possibly calling it French toast instead of eggy bread would be a good first step. But the most funnest bit of the game is the typing.
I played the first CSD on my iPhone using touchscreen controls, so the keyboard control scheme for CSD2 came as something as a shock to me. Every day you prepare a menu for your restaurant, choosing some recipes that you can keep in a holding station like soup or chilli, and others that you have to prepare to order, like fried foods and pasta. Each ingredient is associated with a letter, so to prep things you need to hammer keys in the right order. Some of these make sense (like G for gravy on your S for steak) but Cook, Serve, Delicious! 2!! is also the reason that K stands for “chicken” and E stands for “green beans” in my mind. There are other things to consider - the weather changes what sort of food people want to eat, for example - but the core delight is remembering that K stands for chicken and E stands for green beans when you need to make a new batch of soup in the middle of a lunch rush. Getting this game alone for five bucks is great; it’s less than half the price that it currently is on Steam or Humble, so I dunno what you’re waiting for. The bundle started at 700 games, but now contains a whopping 1000+, and has currently raised over $3 million to split between the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and the Community Bail Fund, to help with the ongoing protests against racial discrimination and police brutality in the United States.
