Have You Played... Cook, Serve, Delicious?

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game recommendations. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.

Cook, Serve, Delicious taps into the parts of my brain which are soothed by maxing out button press combos and also the parts which secretly think I would be brilliant at running a restaurant.

You, the restaurateur, must satisfy the demands of your customers, accepting and fulfilling food orders by pressing the appropriate letter and arrow keys at the right time and in the right order. The fact that each action or ingredient is boiled down to a key is peculiarly pleasing to me. Instead of trying to approximate the pleasure of real cooking, the letter pressing makes it clear that this is a game about the pleasure of pressing buttons.

Sometimes it throws you off – R is ranch dressing in a salad and then it's parmesan in a lasagne recipe. The muscle memory confusion that created meant I bore a grudge against real-life lasagne for about a week. Also soup requires you to have like nine hands and superhuman reflexes.

Learning the recipes and keeping your customers happy means you'll be earning more money and can upgrade your restaurant in various ways. Your end goal is to take the establishment from run-down diner to five star dining experience. Or master soup-making, obviously...

Ugh. Talking about it for this long has made me reinstall it. This can only end well for my workflow.