Game Details Developer: Ghost Town Games

Publisher: Team17 Digital

Platform: PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One (PC reviewed)

Rating: E for Everyone

Release Date: August 3, 2016

Price: £12.99, $16.99, €15.99

Links: Steam | PlayStation Store | Xbox Store | Official website Ghost Town Games: Team17 Digital: PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One (PC reviewed): E for EveryoneAugust 3, 2016: £12.99, $16.99, €15.99

It's not often that I sit down to play a video game with my significant other. Oh sure, we'll play through Until Dawn together, taking turns to steer characters to their deaths, or turn into a crack crime-fighting detective duo to solve the mysteries of Her Story. But there's only so long that you can sit and watch another person play a game before it gets, well...boring.

Worldwide, simultaneous online multiplayer might have made playing games a more exciting experience for the lonesome couch competitor, but for the guy or gal that wants to sit and play a game with someone in the same room, the options are a tad limited.

Which is why I'm so enamoured with Overcooked. It is the quintessential couch co-op experience, a game with a simple premise that's easy to pick up and play, and that brings out the absolute best and worst in those who play it. Oh sure, you'll start out as best friends, gently encouraging each other as you laugh off early mishaps. A dropped onion here, a mishandled plate there—who cares right? But then the washing piles up. No one is chopping lettuce. There's a batch of french fries in the deep fat fryer that a certain someone was supposed to be watching and now they've caught fire. Tempers fray, panic ensues, expletives are hurled.

You don't truly know a person until they've screamed bloody murder at you for failing to add a slice of tomato to a virtual burger bun.

At its core, Overcooked is a simple assembly game. You're given a recipe, a list of orders, and a time limit to complete them in. You pull the appropriate ingredients from a container, chop them up, cook them, and then serve the finished dish on a plate to hungry diners. There are only two buttons to deal with: one for picking up items, and another for chopping things up. It's a simple premise, but one that allows for a surprising amount of complexity.













For starters, up to four to players can work in a kitchen together, allowing you to divide up the work. But who does what? Do you stick your best person on chopping duty, or is such a menial task best left to the guy that's barely capable of button mashing? Do you even assign individual tasks? Maybe it's better to just let everyone roam free than try to attempt to produce a sophisticated assembly line system for cranking out onion soup (spoiler: if my girlfriend and I are anything to go on, it's most certainly not).

Recipes start out easy; an onion soup requires three chopped onions to be boiled in a pot before they're poured out into a bowl for serving. A tomato soup is much the same, substituting onions for tomatoes. But then you're asked to make both at once, with orders coming in at random. Suddenly, you need to manage what gets chopped up first, tomatoes or onions, and which to stick in the pot. In the heat of the moment it's all too easy to accidentally stick a chopped onion in the tomato pot, ruining the recipe, or forget to take a batch of soup off the stove before the kitchen timer runs down and it bursts into flames.

Manage those recipes—and get handy with the fire extinguisher handily placed on each level—and the difficulty ramps up further. There are burgers that are made up of tomato, lettuce, patty, and bun, or any combination of them, depending on the order. There are fish and chips that require deft timing with a deep fat fryer, and overstuffed burritos made up of an extremely ambitious list of ingredients. Cleverly, not only do the recipes change, but so too do the environments in which you make them. A silly but thankfully short narrative sets the tone, with a giant spaghetti-and-meatballs monster with an insatiable appetite sending you hurling back through time to the 1990s in order to travel the world's kitchens and learn to cook properly.

Soon, the simple open-plan kitchen is replaced with a pirate ship that rocks back and forth, sliding ingredients and counters around and forcing your team to constantly switch roles. A burger-making level split across two moving trucks on a motorway is particularly tricky, especially if you and your cooking compatriots find yourselves all on the same truck while the other speeds away with half-cooked burger patties on it. Most difficult of all are the ice-based levels, where the slippery surface makes it all too easy to slide past worktops and frying pans into oblivion.

The basic premise always remains the same, but the sheer variety of levels and the detail in their design means Overcooked rarely grows tiresome. Even in later levels, where the difficulty had ramped up and getting a three-star high score was extremely challenging, I always wanted to give the game just one more go.

Well, except when I played on my own. There is a single-player mode, which requires you to swap between two characters, but this feels sloppy and makes the game far more difficult. Overcooked all but requires you to play with other people in order to nail those high scores. And even if it didn't, there's something magical about the brief moments of silence and concentration that pepper the shouting and the panic. Playing on your own, or even over the Internet (Overcooked doesn't support online multiplayer) just wouldn't be the same.

Cleverly designed, and brimming with charm—the cast of characters includes an anthropomorphic cardboard box and a paraplegic racoon—Overcooked is a game that I've been coming back to again and again over the past few weeks, and one that joins the likes of Towerfall Ascension and Rayman Legends on my small but steadily growing list of great couch co-op games. Just make sure your relationship is strong enough to withstand the inevitable fallout.

The good

Hilarious and throughly chaotic co-op action

Smart level design

Charming visuals

East to pick up and play

The bad

No online multiplayer

The ugly

You're gonna need some friends to play this one. You have friends, right?

Verdict

Overcooked is smart co-op game design wrapped up in some delightfully charming visuals. If you're having a party, this is the game to load up.