Hunger Games

Local co-op catering sim Overcoo ked is chaotic bliss, and one of the best couch party games ever made.

There’s fish burning in a fryer and I’m too busy washing plates to stop it. Meanwhile, nobody is cutting potatoes and the paraplegic raccoon in a wheelchair just slipped and fell into an icy river while holding a full plate of french fries ready to serve. The fryer goes up in flames and the tabby cat rushes for the fire extinguisher. We still need to cut potatoes. All in all, this is merely an average level of catastrophe in Overcooked. This is a wonderfully chaotic local co-op game that gives real power to the words “too many cooks spoil the broth.” At its best, a team of four players look like a beautiful mix of ballet and an assembly line, chopping ingredients, shuttling them to cookers, and then serving the finished meals. At its worst, they look like one of Gordon’s Ramsay’s nightmares. Either way it’s an absolute blast to play.

Overcooked is a race against time, where you and your team are trying to finish and deliver as many dishes as possible. It’s basically a two button game, and actions are kept standard across most meals you make: put chopped stuff in pots or pans, let it cook, then put cooked stuff on plates. Every order completed gets you points, every one you miss loses you points. Simple enough, but very rarely that straightforward in practice.

Where Overcooked really shines, and where the vast majority of its challenge comes from, is its level design. Levels start simple—an outdoor kitchen with random people walking across your path, a pirate ship that tilts and slides your tables back and forth—but quickly escalate until your kitchen is split across three moving trucks or on shifting islands in a lake of lava. The harder levels in the game always kept me coming back for more, trying to get a three star rating.

Suddenly I’m driving back across Overcooked’s charming level-select map, tracking down and tryharding any levels I only had two stars on. It’s easy to ‘complete’ a level, as the one star requirement is generally low—except for the final set of levels which ramps up dramatically. There’s no way to fail entirely, which I actually disliked as it removed some of the pressure when time was about to run out on an order. But to get three stars for most levels requires a gameplan and a coordinated team. We would often pause a level right at the start just to plan our strategy and assign roles to each person.

The levels in Overcooked, however, are specifically designed to throw this sort of planning into chaos, and inevitably things would fall apart. The game didn’t want us to have a plan, it wanted us to think on our feet. What happens when the pirate ship tilts, the tables slide, and suddenly Evan and his raccoon don’t have access to the burners anymore? It’s being able to quickly communicate and swap roles that let us conquer some of the game’s harder stages, and when our communication broke down it was joyous chaos.

Soon, your kitchen is split across three moving trucks or a lake of lava

cooking for one

Sadly, Overcooked just isn’t as much fun alone. Playing solo, you control two chefs you can swap between, and chopping ingredients takes a lot longer than while playing multiplayer. This let me start chopping an onion with one chef, swap to the other to start another task, then swap back when the chopping was done. Instead of being about adapting to the level and sharing tasks, Overcooked becomes more like StarCraft— a game of micro and finding the optimal order to complete those tasks.

With four players gathered around, Overcooked is one of the best couch party games ever made. It’s the perfect balance of chaos that can be conquered with skill. With two or three players, the game gets easier and much more strategic, with room to see what you’re doing and think about what needs to be done. With one, it’s all about challenging yourself, and a lot of the whimsical fun of shouting at the screen is lost.