The platformer is a classic genre of game that’s served us countless classics, just being simple obstacle courses where you jump from one thing to another. It’s not that malleable of a genre, though, as most attempts to fuse it with something else end up clumsily undermining the difficult-to-perfect mechanics of a platformer.
Similarly, Cooking games have received all sorts of variations, from chaotic restaurant management sims to cozy games that teach real lessons on preparing food. It’s a little more malleable, but I’ve still only seen a few cooking games be done well because balancing a ton of mechanics is shockingly difficult.
So, given those two factors, imagine my surprise upon seeingMagical Delicacy, a fusion course of platforming and cooking, attempting to merge the two genres. My mind had to process all the ways this could be done, but in the end, the game surprised me with the way it made this genre collaboration come about.
Will it be a chaotic blend of two separate games that taste terrible together, or will it be a perfectly sweetened smoothie of genres I love?
We’ll put a lens on how this game throws together its various styles, and find out if it’s a dish worth tasting in our Magical Delicacy review, done on PC.
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Going Off Recipe
This game is built off the concept of being a half cooking simulator, half platformer, and to accomplish that, you platform around a big city to deliver meals and fulfill quests. This doesn’t sound half bad, and in my opinion, it could be done quite well if both aspects felt equally fleshed out.
However, despite being a game that’s openly about cooking, the actual process of creating meals is done in one of the least engaging ways I’ve ever seen. You just throw in your ingredients, wait for the progress bar to fill, then be sure to take the food out before it burns, and there is nothing else to it.
I would have likeda minigame or something of substanceto do the cooking, but that was reserved for collecting ingredients, which arguably should have been the other way around.
On top of that, while it could be nice to get into the flow of things and start prepping and cooking many things at once, the character controller makes every aspect of the game worse.
You’re usually fulfilling orders for characters you’ll find all about the sprawling, Metroidvania-ish map, but the platforming challenges on the way just make it inconvenient.
Your character feels sluggish and unresponsive, and the jump often gets you stuck on a platform where it can’t decide if you’ve landed or not.
The character controller is the most important thing to get right in a platformer, bar none, and this game just doesn’t do it. Indie platformers usuallydon’t spend thousands of hours on the fundamentals, and this is why you should. Movement is incredibly stop-and-start, imprecise, and unwieldy, and it’s just not fun to move around.
It’s neither a satisfying cooking game nor a satisfying platformer. In my mind, I had envisioned something akin toCuisineer, where you’d do platforming to collect ingredients and upgrades, then manage your restaurant to get money for upgrades to the platforming side.
Instead, it turns out to be an uncomfortable emulsion of the two that serves neither side well.
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Raw in the Middle
Magical Delicacyhas some of the most obnoxious timing-based elements I’ve ever seen in a platformer in my life.
None of them feel synced up with one another, and whether it’s a disappearing platform or a random waterfall that pushes you down, it’ll come out of nowhere and ruin your jump, and it’s not fun.
On top of that, the idea of progression in this game is to give you upgrades like a double jump or harder and more complex recipes.
These recipes aren’t fun, though, as they quickly devolve into more waiting, whether for your cutting board to finish or for shopkeepers to restock.
The exploration also gets a bit tiring, as you need to constantly venture out and redo the same platforming challenges over and over to get orders, then backtrack back home.
It gets rather irritating and would’ve been way more manageable if the orders came to you after meeting the person for the first time, so you don’t have to go back and forth a ton.
You unlock some limited fast travel after a few hours of gameplay, but it feels more like a band-aid solution to the problem than anything.
If you’re making a platformer and the platforming isn’t fun, forcing more and more platforming on your players isn’t going to make it more entertaining. The upgrades are nice but rather basic, and seasoning a burnt dish won’t make it better.
Mise En Place
The story elements in Magical Delicacy are quite nice, even if it feels like I’m mostly being slowly fed bits of lore every time I interact with the dedicated important players in the plot.
Every character has some fun side story going on, and every character also knows several other characters, which makes for a nice bit of world-building.
It’s a neat and intricate story, and nothing particularly falls flat, but it doesn’t come up often enough for me to be super invested.
It almostreminds me of the way Stardew Valley does its story, where it’s mostly just a returning plot to the shenanigans you get up to, even if Magical Delicacy is more involved with its plot.
It’s fun to see witch drama, side-quests with NPCs that have them interacting with one another, and narrative through lines that make the world feel connected.
I’d like a more prominent main plot to follow, but as subtle bits of writing sprinkled about a game that’s not really about the story, it serves its purpose just fine.
I quite enjoy interacting with the characters, and they have way more dialogue and get new bits of story to them far more frequently than I’d expected.
They’re all fun, if not super unique, like the gruff blacksmith woman, the reserved Witch mentor, or the playful and self-esteemed princess.
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A Spoiled Feast for the Eyes
While Magical Delicacy’s highly detailed pixel art looks incredibly good on the surface, you’ll notice it’s not as nice as it appears when you play the game.
For once, the character art all looks just a bit off, not feeling polished or part of the same style as everything else, and the backgrounds have so much detail that they feel a bit busy.
Everything feels jittery and shaky, and that’s combined with animations feeling unresponsive or unpolished or flat-out missing, like with the high jump, all leading to the game feeling a bit gross.
For example, when you jump, your character jitters quite a bit, and the landing animations take so long that you’re already running somewhere before they’ve finished.
I think this problem with this game’s art could be solved by putting less effort into it. A simpler style with fewer animations that ismore in tune with the gameplay, likeHollow KnightorCeleste, would make this feel way better.
For now, though, it’s just a bit of a mess and only really looks appealing when you’re not playing it.
It’s not the worst-looking game out there; but it could serve the gameplay far better. As it stands, the best I can say is that the music is lovely.
It’s full of beautifully orchestrated pieces, usually with very playful foreground pianos, and a great backing of strings that makes it sound almost heavenly, which all sounded great on the ears throughout the game.
Overall, if you simplified the backgrounds, perhaps blurred them, and simplified character art and put a ton of effort into polishing over everything else, this could feel far better.
It has a lot of potential, and every screenshot of this game looks quite beautiful. The art in isolation is great, but in practice, it does not serve the gameplay very well.
Closing Thoughts: While Magical Delicacy can deliver cozy vibes, it drops the magic ball on almost everything else. The platforming isn’t fun, cooking doesn’t feel satisfying, and the main gameplay loop boils down to doing fetch quests for NPCs just to get a few extra bits of story and a generic upgrade. Both the cooking and platforming sides work against each other, and everything lacks polish, especially the animations. It’s a fundamentally flawed experience with a clashing visual identity, with a great soundtrack and pleasant story being the main saving graces.
Magical Delicacy
Reviewed on PC
WHERE TO PLAY
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