All our lives, we're fed a lot of the same lines about food. "The way to a person's heart is through their stomach." "An apple a day keeps the doctor away." "The nacho fries are back at Taco Bell, do you want to go get some?"
Each of these equally important sayings communicate the same thing: the importance of food for a community, for a culture, for people. It's more than sustenance, it's a statement about the people who make it and where they come from. And while cooking games have been around for a long time, it's rare that a game captures that aspect of cooking in a meaningful way.
Magical Delicacy blends this cozy cooking concept with a surprisingly tricky Metroidvania platforming adventure and ends up with a dish that should work for fans of either type of game.
But like any good food critic, let's slow things down, assess each part of the dish individually, and render a verdict.
Just the Facts |
Developer: skaule |
Publisher: Whitethorn Games |
Platform(s): PC*, Xbox Series S and X, Nintendo Switch *denotes platform reviewed on |
Price: $24.99 |
Release Date: July 16, 2024 (PC and Xbox), August 15, 2024 (Switch) |
Review key provided by publisher. |
Finding community at the bottom of a soup bowl
Magical Delicacy is the first commercial release for solo developer Steven Kaule (who goes by skaule) out of Hamburg, Germany. Not unlike a chef, skaule spent a decade refining their skills making games just for them. They made things that made them happy, he learned new skills, and when they were finally ready to show the world what they were capable of, so was born this wholesome Metroidvania-lite cooking adventure.
It should be noted that skaule teamed up with the great folks at Whitethorn Games for publishing support, and you know what that means... a full suite of accessibility features are available here! A full description of the options available can be found here, but I especially want to shout out the visual tools that highlight platform outlines and dim complex backgrounds to help guide your path through the world and make exploration simpler.
In Magical Delicacy, players make the horrible decision to start a commercial kitchen (if watching The Bear has taught me anything) as Flora, a young witch who is looking to further tap into her magical abilities in the town of Grat. She waltzes into town, gets a home, a shop, and a rent bill. Like any young adult looking to find meaning in their life, Flora's aimless at the outset. But when a baby dragon enters her life, purpose is thrust upon her.
Grat is home to several unique covens — a diverse variety of fantasy races, including the cat-like Tilin and the amphibious Gaball — and to a deeper connection to the source of magic in the world they all inhabit. As Flora flits about, making friends and cooking up dishes for them as she goes, she can't go two steps without stumbling over some evidence of the magic surrounding the island of Grat.
Whether it's the strange plants growing on floating islands, the fae tucked into corners of the world, the whispers of the dragons who once inhabited the lands, or the strange roommate who you find squatting in your new home, Magical Delicacy has a surprisingly deep well of lore and fantastical beasts to pull from. Food is so tightly connected to culture, and skaule takes painstaking steps to ensure that comes through in the world they've created — like how Gaball cuisine is based on the types of crops that can be cultivated in aquafarms that are built near the amphibious dock-based homes of their people. This level of detail and care can be seen in a lot of the lore built into Magical Delicacy, and it's a treat to see the ways these little things come together to build a fully realized world.
Food is so tightly connected to culture, and skaule takes painstaking steps to ensure that comes through in the world they've created.
The actual moment-to-moment story is a lot more low-key, more about the power of community in cooking: in sharing a cup of soup with a neighbor, in helping people see the value in the "dumb" crops they sell at the market, in teaching a young royal there's more to life than desserts. You progress through the story and learn more about each of the game's varied cast of characters through the meals you cook for them. It's so low-key at times that it dips to the point of being overly dry, but there are some sneakily emotional, impactful stories.
Magical Delicacy's main story is a grand magical mystery that just never feels like it fulfills the promise of its setup, with the clashing covens and the looming threat of the dragon hunters coming after the baby dragon Flora's harboring. Nearly every plot point and character relationship gets up to the point of starting to get really interesting before petering out and vanishing completely. The writing is cozy, the stories are wholesome, but I wanted a little bit more to make all the cooking that extra bit worth it.
Especially with some of the problems I had with the latter half of the adventure.
Perfectly emulating the ups and downs of cooking
Magical Delicacy's core loops sit in two worlds: a cooking sim management experience and a surprisingly tricky platforming Metroidvania-lite. Both aspects are way more involved than you'd expect, to their detriment in some ways, but are involved enough and have some interesting synergies, such that I think fans of either genre could come to this as a way to help introduce them to the world of the other genre. The way the best bits of both genres converge and feed into each other makes this game sing in its first few hours. But as it goes on, some frustrating design decisions take hold of the adventure.
Cooking in Magical Delicacy is all about flavors and ingredient types. Flora gathers ingredients from all over Grat, both from foraging and from various merchants, and brings them home to one of a variety of cooking stations to craft new meals. You're allowed some wiggle room in the creation of each dish, as there are both hyper-specific recipes that call for very particular ingredients and looser ones that allow for some taste experimentation — but you're mainly going to be following recipes, unless you want to end up with an inventory full of failed meals (which you cannot get rid of, or at least I never found out how).
For example, a recipe may call for a vegetable and an herb. Some may ask for a roasted ingredient, meaning it needs to be tossed in the oven first, and for ingredients that taste spicy. Where things get complicated are the specific order requests: in short, how someone's personal taste affects recipes. They'd love that spicy roasted-ingredient sandwich, but make it insipid instead. Make that pie you made last time, but make sure you only use rare ingredients. So on and so forth.
It makes nailing a recipe a complicated affair at times, not unlike a chef tinkering with some new dish to get it just right. Finding the perfect set of ingredients and preparation methods that both satisfy the recipe and the customer's needs can sometimes feel impossible. Having to shuffle a set of ingredients with cumbersome inventory management and even more cumbersome ingredient-gathering methods — which I'll get into shortly — made the process of cooking a bit more painful than I'd like. There's some truly enjoyable satisfaction when you do finally crack a recipe, but the pain on the way isn't the best.
To gather your ingredients, you've got to set out across the island of Grat to explore for new forageables and merchants to buy from. This is where the Metroidvania sets in. At the start, you're restricted to just a few areas in Grat, thanks to ledges just out of reach and areas of town that require special passes to access. As Flora cooks new dishes for more people, finishing quests, her witchy powers advance and new lands unlock, each with their own rare ingredients and people to cook for.
This is where those synergies I mentioned earlier truly manifest. Finally finding that missing piece of a recipe you'd been spending hours wondering about makes Magical Delicacy a sneaky "most satisfying" entry into the Metroidvania-lite genre. But it isn't perfect.
For one, the game rarely lets you know where folks are, and, most importantly, where certain ingredients can be found. It's surprisingly hardcore for an otherwise cozy and wholesome experience. You eventually can unlock a tracker for merchants. But when it comes to the customers, who change their location regularly, and for ingredients that seemingly only spawn in one place, it can be strangely frustrating to track things down. It creates more reasons to go out and explore, and helps add some playtime to a surprisingly beefy 20-30 hour experience (dependent on how many side stories you do). But when you just need one hornpepper, but can't quite remember where it grows and haven't unlocked a vendor that sells it, even the gentlest of nudges could have helped.
It doesn't help that some of the platforming needed to get around these areas is sneakily tricky at times.
On the whole, the in-depth nature of Magical Delicacy's systems seemed at odds with the otherwise laid-back wholesome vibes the game seeks to exude. And there are a handful of small decisions like this: cooking periods are mainly taken up by waiting for meters to fill, and the day-night cycle can make waiting the only way forward, especially when some things can only be made at night. None of these choices are inherently bad, but some tweaking could have made all aspects of this game that much more enjoyable for me.
The in-depth nature of Magical Delicacy's systems seemed at odds with the otherwise laid-back wholesome vibes the game seeks to exude.
Comforting vibes in the land of Grat
What definitely works in concert with its vibes are Magical Delicacy's aesthetic choices. Skaule is an illustrator, and their artistic sensibilities are in full force here. The island of Grat is full of fun little details and magical particles that sell the idea that this land is exactly where Flora needs to be to hone her craft as a witch. The diversity of its inhabitants makes exploring to meet them worth it. If you can't tell by how much I've brought them up, the Gaball are a particular favorite. And the small ways the dishes you cook visually change based on what ingredients you use is a great touch that many other cooking-focused games miss out on.
And with the side-on perspective, skaule makes great use of shadows in the foreground to really give depth to each of its scenes and give the "camera" its place in the scene.
Composer Dale North provides a flowing woodwind- and piano-heavy soundtrack that only emphasizes the magical, otherworldly vibes of Grat. At times, the soundtrack helped sell a Ghibli-esque tone with its plucky playfulness and adventurous melodies. Toss in the magic of its setting, the character-focused narrative, and the comfort of cooking, and it's easy to find your way to the comparison.
I also want to shout out the sound design in general for its impact and clarity, constantly present over the top of everything and helping to guide you through cooking processes, especially since you can't always keep an eye on each station as you bounce around. While some things frustrate me, skaule clearly gave every piece of this game equal amounts of care and attention, and I celebrate that.
Magical Delicacy is almost too successful in how it captures the good and bad of the cooking process. It's more involved than you'd expect, with its processes a bit fiddly and particular, and when you're still learning it all, it's more frustrating than you might like. But the satisfaction of its end product is undeniable, and once you're on the other end, it's easy to appreciate every part of the process that much more.
Skaule shows incredible talent in crafting this game as a solo developer, along with the help of the talented contractors who collaborated with him on this project, and we can't wait to see what comes next in their career.
Video Games Are Good and Magical Delicacy is . . . GOOD. (7/10)
+ emulates the satisfaction of cracking a recipe, a low-stakes wholesome adventure with surprising metroidvania-lite mechanics, truly magical pixel art world
- emulates the frustration of failing a recipe over and over, frustrating lack of guidance at times, metroidvania appeal vanishes in the back half of the game
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