Ahh, cooking games-- a relaxing and even addicting way to waste away my hours on. I become a gourmet chef, taking on the reigns of a restaurant ways away. Food is known to be the way to someone’s heart, which is why a lot of fellow gamers enjoy this beloved genre.
Development of cooking games spans across several platforms, from mobile, to console, and PC. You can make the most out of your world as you serve delicious dishes to your digital customers.
Overcooked! 2
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Gameplay. You can play up to four characters either online or local co-op.
Become the best chef in the Onion Kingdom with your friends in this multiplayer co-op. Play over six different worlds (not including the DLCs), serving people all across the kingdom at a fast-paced rate. This PC game offers so much for individuals who want a challenging game to play with their friends.
On each of the 36 levels, you are timed to chop, cook, and serve, so work fast and don’t make mistakes or you will lose money. Some even have obstacles to block teams ways from winning the game. This game has wonderful and fun characters, a little story, and a little bit of stress that can pay off.
Overcooked! All You Can Eat
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Game map display with assist and story mode as options.
Overcooked! All You Can Eat features both Overcooked! and Overcooked! 2 in better graphics, settings, and many accessibility features. This is available almost all online, so you don’t have to opt into local co-op.
One big takeaway from this game is the assist feature, which is accessible for all players who have dyslexia, maybe a youngin’ who is grasping their first video game. The Overcooked! games, with already endless possibilities in the Onion Kingdom, have opened the world to even more players.
PlateUp!
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Progressively build your restaurant while your clientele grows with you.
Manage and own a restaurant with new recipes every day with yourself or your friends. Earn money to purchase more utilities and furniture for your place by cooking and serving through the workweek.
The game has a roguelike progression, where more customers come in with bigger and bigger sizes. Keep up and make no big mistakes or you will be on the news for a badly reviewed restaurant! You get to learn more and more recipes, so make sure you can remember all of them.
Venba
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Venba is packed with gorgeous art, and each dish as delicious as ever.
Venba is a beautiful indie story surrounded by South Indian cuisine and a family who creates food based on memories. The title is named after the character, an immigrant mother in the 1980s who navigates living in Canada.
The mix of a cooking game and a heartfelt story tugged at me while enjoying the music and art style of the game. Embrace a culture through its food while seeing a story of first-generation immigrants experiencing struggles in a newfound place.
Coffee Caravan
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The simplistic art and gameplay of Coffee Caravan.
Your caravan is small, but you move your way across different levels, growing your setup. Coffee Caravan takes you on a barista trip around the world with roguelike gameplay. The map gives you options of shops, random events, and treasures; just like a roguelike map would.
The gameplay is very similar to PlateUp! As the graphics itself are simplistic, the clientele gets progressively more difficult over time. To finish a whole “section” you have to have several drink recipes completed and served to move on. Sooner, you get to learn many drinks, the habits of the different characters, and what works best for you.
Chef Life: A Restaurant Simulator
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Create your specialized meals for your growing restaurant.
Work with your associate and former classmate Kassim in opening your brand-new restaurant. Build your restaurant with various daily specials following all the Michelin Star guidelines and have a certified restaurant.
Choose various gourmet dishes to master and put on your signature menu. With over four and growing DLCs, the possibilities are endless. Manage your dream restaurant and experience the life of a professional restaurant owner.
Kebab Chefs! - Restaurant Simulator
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As a pretty niche cooking simulator, Kebab Chefs! has wonderful graphics for its food.
Still in it’s early access, Kebab Chefs! -Restaurant Simulator continuously grows to be a fun game. After your father grants you to take over his restaurant, you become the local kebob chef, now the head of a generational legacy.
As the game is still in development, there are still a bit of kinks to work out. The surfaces, and even the food decay process (yes, the food does spoil) still needs to be worked on, but it is a great game so far. I hope to see how far it goes once it is out of beta.
Cooking Simulator
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There are an infinite amount of recipes you can make, it all depends on how you can get the ingredients.
Experience real-life cooking with step-by-step processes in the Cooking Simulator. There are many possibilities, various ingredients, spices, and cooking tools to choose from.
You are taken in different modes, career mode being the main story and way to learn the ropes around your restaurant. Build the once shabby restaurant into the place of your dreams, learning recipes as you go.
Papa's Freezeria Deluxe
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Build cold treats for your customers per their request to receive the best ratings.
As a kid in the late 2000s, I grew up with the Papa Louis’s food game franchise at school during computer class at downtime. Now, the game has coursed its way to a bigger platform on Steam, with a lot more capabilities. Freezeria Deluxe takes you back to the original game but with seasonal and year-round treats.
Slowly inch up the ranking to unlock different items, characters, and special events to play in the game. There are over 36 ranks you can reach in the game, the last one greeting you with the one and only Papa Louis.
One-armed cook
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Create chaos in the kitchen with only one hand.
Ever think of the bizzare concept of a co-op cooking game? One-armed cook definitely would be that game. Run a restaurant with only one arm, navigating the kitchen as quick as you can.
You can play up to four players on one of the three levels this game has. Deal with bigger challenges like dealing with pests, and vermin, and prevent yourself from burning the house down. Earn the most money without causing a mess and you win the level.
Ravenous Devils
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Colony based third-person look with inticing artwork and style.
Join the Ravenous Devils in a colony-based, third-person game as you use humans as a secret ingredient in your recipes. Think… Sweeney Todd, but less of the revenge and just the lust for power and money.
Play as a husband and wife, a tailor who murders his clients, bringing them down into the kitchen where the wife cooks them. I would suggest this game for people who do enjoy a dark theme with their games.
Chef: A Restaurant Tycoon Game
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Run many themed restaurants under your management.
If you love tycoon games and cooking simulators, this is a perfect blend of the two. The goal is to own as many restaurants in town, each in every district. Start from the ground and up to become a restaurant tycoon.
This can be considered a long-haul game, wracking up a lot of hours if you become fully invested. Each and every restaurant can be customized with 150 variations of designs, with so many more appliances that can change based on your target customer.
Touhou Mystia's Izakaya
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Marvel in the anime art style of the Touhou Project’s world.
Take your restaurant to another world full of pixel anime art. Based on the Touhou Project (a typical bullet-hell game) you play as a girl named Mystia an owner of a small restaurant. The gameplay is totally different from the other games in the series, just like a beach episode in an action anime.
Collect food and meet many characters along the way of your journey of building up your Izakaya. Experience the world of Gensokyo in a new light, and make regulars you will love at your restaurant.
Cook, Serve, Delicious!
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The gameplay includes keys to include each ingredient in the meal.
Cook, Serve, Delicious! Is a restaurant sim where nothing is casual about its gameplay. Each recipe you make revolves around using the keyboard, each key for a different ingredient.
As the game progresses, so does the difficulty of new recipes. Make sure you include the right ingredients for each customer or you may lose money and your customers.
Yakiniku Simulator
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Simplistic gameplay in Yakiniku Simulator.
This cooking game does not have much to provide for you. Remember being a kid when you got to use your first piece of handheld tech and there were mobile food games? That is exactly what this game is.
Yakiniku or “grilled meat” is exactly what you picture this game to be, a game about a meat grill. This is a game that you would not have a lot to go from, but if you want just time to chill and cook, this would be the game for you.
An article and poetry writer who’s all about gaming? My two life-long favorite things wrapped into one. When these worlds collided, I became unstoppable.
Gamer Since:
2007
Favorite Genre:
RPG
Currently Playing:
Sims 4 Mostly!
Top 3 Favorite Games:
Stardew Valley Bachelor Ratings (All Stardew Bachelors Ranked Worst To Best), The Sims 4, Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward