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There can never be enough cooking games, and Abra-Cooking-Dabra, the newest gaming foray by developer Door 407, helps prove that theory. You’re whisked away to a mysterious new restaurant in London, where you must help an eccentric suave cat serve any customer that strolls up to your establishment. What makes this game different is the methods and challenges you’ll face along the way, all whilst using a card-based cooking system to make and serve meals. It’s as wild and weird as it sounds, and yet feels neatly crafted and comfy in execution, requiring harvesting all of your forethought and planning to perfect it.
Card Cooking at its Finest
Your goal for each level is to use your sets of available ingredients, cooking devices, and kitchen equipment cards to craft whatever dishes your guests for the level order. You’re limited by the amount of money available to you at the start of the level and what you’re awarded by each guest when you deliver them their specific dishes. These guests won’t wait forever though, and each action in the kitchen takes a certain amount of time to complete. So, inevitably, your success will be determined by a combination of careful planning of what order to do your required cooking steps in, where to try and pre-prepare certain ingredients, and when to buy new “booster packs” of supplies within each level. There’s still an element of luck, however, because each pack of supplies that you purchase pulls randomly from the ingredients, sauces, seeds, and many other necessary items to cook with. This means that sometimes, your most careful planning could still leave you without an essential oil to fry your fries with, or an egg to top off that perfect breakfast platter. While this part of the game did supply an element of anticipation, I felt like it was sort of an unnecessary gamification of the process, especially as I got into the much more complicated levels later on. Even as early as level 5 I was crossing my fingers hoping for the right sauce to pop out of the torn open pack I bought with my last coin. However, I learned that as I played more, the game made more options available to you to prevent or plan for these situations. You can also sell cards you deem unnecessary to the cat for coins, a method of earning coins I forgot existed until I had failed a couple levels because I assumed I couldn't buy any other packs for lack of funds.
Overall though, the cozy joy of preparing my continuously crowded workspace of kitchen utensils, seeds, produce, and cooking hardware by dragging them around the wide canvas made available to me was enough to put that chance of failure in the background, as I still felt that with proper planning, I was able to overcome those challenges. Additionally, the game provides you with these sort of “Wild” cards that give one-time use advantages, like giving you credit for finishing a dish without having to prepare anything, or resetting a timer. These cards were life savers at times, and what’s wonderful about them was their persistence through levels. Not only were those cards saved between levels, but the game also eventually awards and allows for the buying of things like fridges, which would let you save a certain amount of ingredients once you were done with a level to bring to the next. So if you knew you were having trouble “rolling” sunflower oil, for example, you could play the previous level and make sure to bring some along next time. Being able to bank cards and use them at crucial points in the future was a great idea, and made the game feel like a fully-fledged campaign instead of individual levels. With 25 levels to play, it also has plenty of hours worth of recipes and surprise situations to adapt to and enjoy within the normal gameplay loop, like "fiery" customers or icy environmental hazards, just to name a few. Also, you’re able to pause or speed up the game at-will, allowing you a chance to get your things in order or ready your next planned meal. Things won’t start actually cooking, cutting, or the like until you press play again, but it was an invaluable feature.
Purretty Palettes
Graphically, the game is smooth, wispy, and has a refined palette of colors. Lots of rounded edges, beveling, and an overall feel of class and definition, while still being just silly enough with its characters. I especially loved the world map that you move through when unlocking new levels. The main cat connoisseur is also full of fun idle animations that play while you’re cooking. Guests will also visit you throughout, and are usually of the animal variety. This of course pleases me greatly, especially the “special” boss guests that ask for the most rare of dishes for you to concoct. These are made possible only by doing very well during the rest of the level you’re on and collecting their unique ingredients that are required for their recipe. Beating them usually resulted in some special unlocks for your kitchen workspace and a “wild” card to use when you want.
Do you like Jazz?
I was pleasantly surprised with how well-produced and defined the audio direction was in the game. It’s jazzy, appropriate for the gameplay going on, and really jives with the whole feel the devs were going for. You’ll be spending quite a bit of time on each level, and it would’ve been easy to phone in the backing soundtrack as a secondary piece of content. Instead, it’s a treat all its own, and you’re able to really be whisked into the slightly magical and sultry world of cooking Abra-cooking-dabra is going for with its art design. I was happy to see the accompanying sound effects for cooking actions, like cutting, grilling, boiling, and many, many others were handled with the same level of care, as nothing is too distracting or overbearing. It had sort of an asmr-like effect on me as I played along to complete each guest’s order, transporting me to the ephemeral world I was conducting my culinary tasks within.
In Conclusion
Abra-Cooking-Dabra caught me by surprise with its card-based cooking gameplay and intriguing visual concepts employed to work within. Luckily, when stepping into the kitchen, I was happy to find a well executed idea that provided plenty of “move at your own pace” gameplay that still required savvy planning and preparation. If the game looks like one you’d enjoy, Abra-Cooking-Dabra ensures you will and doesn’t try and get in the way of a good meal. It’s a treat that I’ll be snacking on for a while.
