Cook Serve Forever demo lets you start meal prep ahead of April's early access
Serving meals in a solarpunk city
I am fond of Cook, Serve, Delicious!, a trilogy of cooking games which became increasingly ambitious until the third was about operating a food truck on a post-apocalyptic road trip.
Cook Serve Forever looks more ambitious again. It's a new game from the same developers with similar combo-tapping food prep at its core, but set in a new solarpunk city. As of today, there's a demo you can play and an early access release date set for April.
Cook Serve Forever casts you as Nori Kaga, an owner of a food cart who dreams of one day being as successful as her idol, Chef Rhubarb. You'll need to design a menu and serve customers by juggling orders and accurately recreating recipes in order to succeed.
That core is really strong, even if it's simple. Each recipe needs to be constructed by adding ingredients in a particular order, with ingredients and cooking tied to different button presses. Press X to add lettuce, hold Y to add tomato, hit B 3 times to add the burger, and then a ten second wait you'll need to use to start prepping another customer's order. Fail to juggle orders and you'll burn food, mis-prepare items, and send customers away frustrated.
There's lots that's new around that, this time, including: a new "dynamic cooking system" which mixes up exactly how you'll prep orders; a new fully-voiced story (starring, among others, SungWon Cho aka ProZD); and optional side quests to pursue around the fictional city of Helianthus.
Cook Serve Forever will launch into Steam Early Access sometime in April but there's a demo you can download from Steam today.