OVERCOOKED

More like “well done”

Deep in the Onion Kingdom – a magical place where no-one has any idea how to design a kitchen – your job is to avert apocalypse through strategic use of cookery. The end of days can be forestalled by feeding a ravenous cartoon Cthulhu, but first you need to learn how to cook.

You and up to three other players each get top-down control of a diminutive chef, and each level is a new, more challenging kitchen – sometimes on an ice floe, sometimes split down the middle between speeding lorries. 1 It’s where Gordon Ramsay will be sent after being flambéed by a failing American restauranteur.

Your chefs need to work together: one might fetch ingredients, then pass them over a counter so that another can chop and place them onto a conveyor belt, so another can assemble all the bits into burgers. Orders stack up as the timer counts down, and if you fail to get your food to the table in time, your customers flounce out in disgust.

Playing alone gets nigh-on impossible, as you struggle to manoeuvre two chefs at once. There isn’t a way to sex up endlessly chopping onions to pipe out gallons of soup, and slogging through a challenging kitchen time after time to hit the score required to progress is frustrating.

But just like in TowerFall, things change with friends. 2 In both co-op and competitive modes, Overcooked is weirdly compelling, and there’s (n)oodles of satisfaction to be wrung from successfully prepping three different beef sandwiches at once as you bellow at friends for more lettuce. If PS4 get-togethers are commonplace in your home, Overcooked should absolutely be on the menu. Rich Wordsworth

FOOTNOTES1 The ice floe in particular is directly responsible for very loud lunchtime yelling matches in OPM Towers. 2 Contrary to popular belief, too many cooks make broth creation a doddle.