![]() ![]() Achieving the game’s coveted three star rating for a level is all but impossible if your team is not explicitly clear on who is responsible for what task in the kitchen.īy the game’s end, you and your teammates will have overcome impressive challenges, including kitchen platforms that move back and forth over deadly crevasses, kitchen rafts that require ingredients to be thrown across a gulf of water in between rafts, and eventually kitchen platforms that must manually be controlled by one of the cooks. Thus, in my experience, much of our playthrough consisted not in the gameplay itself, but in the strategy before and after levels. Someone has to chop vegetables to order, someone has to wash dishes, someone has to cook meats, someone has to plate the cooked ingredients, etc. Whereas the game’s opening levels allowed some room for error, you will be unable to advance without direct cooperation and communication between everyone in the kitchen. ![]() ![]() Over the course of the game’s many levels, you become increasingly reliant on specialization rice cookers and steamers are introduced, dishwashing becomes a priority, running plates and ingredients across the kitchen becomes hazardous, etc.Īs the kitchen becomes a kind of enemy, antagonist, or difficulty setting for your team, communication becomes the priority for all the cooks in the kitchen. The game breaks this simple layout apart. You have a cutting board, plates, a stove top, and a place to deliver out food to customers. In the game’s beginning, the kitchen is laid out as an open floor, with different functions located in the various corners of the level. This kitchen changes from level to level. The entirety of Overcooked 2 takes place in a kitchen – a place I swore I would never find myself in again. Eventually, you are working on multiple orders at once, at different places in the kitchen, all while trying to coordinate with your teammates (other kitchen workers) which ingredients you need for which order. Orders start to become variable, where you have to pay close attention to modifications to the order – things like different meats or vegetables, things like rice or no rice, etc. Then the game slowly ratchets up the difficulty and complexity. The game starts you off with relatively straightforward orders, things like chopping ingredients and adding them to a simple dish, and then expediting the order out to the customer before they grow impatient. One of the shocking things about Overcooked 2 is how such a mundane premise can build into such complexity. This brought us to Overcooked 2, a fundamentally cooperative game about overcoming increasingly ridiculous obstacles to complete specific orders from your restaurant’s customers. Then for whatever reason we moved away to playing Left 4 Dead and its sequel, games about a team of survivors slaughtering waves and hordes of vicious zombies. We began playing Don’t Starve Together, a game about survival, the gathering of resources, and fending off deadly monsters. ![]() But our group of friends has made a habit of seeking out co-op and multiplayer games for streaming on the weekends. It isn’t a game that I would have sought out, for aforementioned reasons. I started playing Overcooked 2 recently with some of my fellow Epilogue streamers on Twitch. I, however, can never forget them – which is why I find it so incredibly uncanny (and unlikely) that I have been playing and loving the restaurant-based game, Overcooked 2. But overall, its psychologically healthier to ignore these morbid considerations. Occasionally, we make the joke that the cooks will “spit in our food” if we are rude customers. Working in a restaurant reveals to you the dark, seedy underbelly of the otherwise luxurious dining experience we tend to expect when going out for a meal.Īs consumers, we don’t tend to imagine the reality of improperly washed dishes, or unsanitary food preparation, or unwashed cutting boards, or things that drop on the floor, only to be added to the contents of our meal. When I came back to America months later, I solidified my conviction that I never wanted to work in a restaurant, in any capacity, ever again. I worked in the restaurant industry until I went off to study abroad in China during college. They decided that this seventeen-year-old kid was worth promoting to prep cook and eventually pantry chef. But luckily, the chefs noticed my attitude, work ethic, and sense of humor. In this environment, I was the lowest in the dominance hierarchy: the dishwasher. My first job was dishwashing in a pretentious restaurant that prided itself on its kitchen being run by a victor from the television show “Top Chef.” This was my introduction to both the restaurant industry and the workforce. ![]()
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