A new indie game mixes a magical version of Deliveroo with a 2D platformer, that’s hoping to be this year’s latest cosy hit.
In the last few years, keeping up with the news hasn’t inspired much joy. Pandemics, war, and political wrangling can leave you in the mood for a calming escape, which is part of the reason cosy games have enjoyed so much success recently. Massive hits like Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley are backed up by hundreds of indie titles, most of which feature pixel art, whimsical music, and absolutely no bloodshed.
Magical Delicacy is one such game, its friendly, 2D side-scrolling platforming opening up as its Metroidvania gating gradually allows access to increasing volumes of the map. Its heroine, Flora, is a witch who’s recently left home and moved to an apparently witch-friendly town where she sets up a food delivery business.
Unlike Deliveroo, her first act is not to launch an app and recruit an under-compensated, zero hour workforce, but to do all the cooking and delivery work herself. That means going out and meeting hungry townsfolk, finding or buying ingredients, before cooking them for just the right amount of time and bringing them to the person who placed the order.
While outwardly simple, her job is complicated by a number of factors, the first of which is acquiring the right ingredients. While some can be found and harvested, others need to be purchased from suppliers dotted around the map. To buy them you’ll find little bits of currency by walking over crockery, but mostly you’ll need to earn money by delivering food orders.
Things start with your humble cooking pot, which does a bang up job of stews – provided you remember to collect them before they overcook. Soon enough though, you’ll need a chopping board, pestle and mortar, an oven, and more, as your food requests become increasingly complex, often requiring foodstuffs that have been pre-prepared using another piece of kitchen equipment.
Some of those add-ons are purchased at the blacksmith’s shop, while others come from vendors further away on the map. Extra storage for your kitchen, herbs, and the components of potions – an increasing requirement from your expanding customer base – all need to be sourced and then brought back to your shop for preparation and cooking, before setting off on your return journey to the person who ordered them.
The problem with that is the constant traversal, which for the most part isn’t all that tricky, but is insanely laborious. Spending several minutes traipsing from your customer to a vendor, to casting about looking for an obscure ingredient you’ve yet to find, only then to have to return to your shop, do some cooking, then head off in search of whoever it was that wanted it in the first place, is a process that rapidly loses its charm.
Fortunately, much of that drudgery is undone when you unlock fast travel, even if the many bottlenecks and webs of interdependencies remain. To help navigate your way through that you can pin recipes to an easily accessible list on the left of the screen, although you can only store three there at a time, which soon begins to feel inadequate.
There are other issues with the interface, as things get more complex. Some of those can be mitigated by finding and purchasing add-ons for your map or kitchen, but many persist, rendering what might have been reasonably straightforward tasks into irritating memory tests, or reasons to fast travel all over the map in search of missing kitchen equipment or ingredients.
To add to the mild irritants, the game’s day/night cycle is essential in multiple operations. Potions can only be brewed during the hours of darkness, and you’ll also find certain harvestable plants only appear at night or during the day. And while you can go to sleep, skipping straight to dawn, if you need a potion you just have to wait for dusk, with nothing much to do until it arrives.
On the plus side, like a 1990s Japanese role-player, conversations are text-only and despite their sometimes absurd content, they’re played completely straight, the game’s earnest cartoon characters communicating politely and clearly, without even thinking about knocking on the fourth wall. It harks back to a simpler era – a core competence of the cosy genre.
It also doesn’t require much skill. The platforming is generally relaxed rather than challenging, even if there are occasional moments that require sequences of precision jumps. The cooking is even easier. If you abandon a dish while it’s baking or frying it’ll get burnt, but since the process takes at most a few seconds, that’s not something you’re ever likely to experience unless you do it deliberately to see what happens.
The game’s biggest challenge lies with your own power of recall. Trying to remember where a particular ingredient is grown or sold, or where exactly the customer who placed an order is located on the map can be a problem. You can buy markers to drop at important places, so you can find them later, but it’s not a complete solution and the issue it half fixes is mildly annoying rather than a fun and interesting mechanic.
There’s a lot to like about Magical Delicacy. Its gentle pace, lovely looking 16-bit-style graphics, and mellow chiptune soundtrack does more than enough to remove you from the world’s ills for a few hours. However, the limitations of its interface, unfortunate bottlenecks, and emphasis on repeatedly visiting poorly signposted, yet distant, parts of a sprawling map can feel unnecessarily irksome.
Magical Delicacy review summary
In Short: A cosy 2D Metroidvania featuring witches and cookery, that looks delightful but suffers from numerous irritations in its interface and level design.
Pros: Glorious pixel art style and the lack of complex action fits well with the friendly atmosphere. Genial, yet earnest characters take you back to the more optimistic 1990s.
Cons: Traversal is exasperating until you unlock fast travel. Interdependent ingredients and equipment can be a pain, as can trying to remember where you’re going on the large. Inadequately labelled map.
Score: 6/10
Formats: Xbox Series X/S (reviewed), Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC
Price: £20.99*
Publisher: Whitethorn Games
Developer: sKaule
Release Date: 16th July 2024
Age Rating: 3
*Game Pass day one
Email [email protected], leave a comment below, follow us on Twitter, and sign-up to our newsletter.
To submit Inbox letters and Reader’s Features more easily, without the need to send an email, just use our Submit Stuff page here.
For more stories like this, check our Gaming page.
MORE : Two Hollywood legend’s buttocks are literally up for grabs thanks to Xbox
MORE : F1 Manager 2024 review – managing expectations
MORE : Evo 2024 round-up: Tekken 8 resurrects Heihachi and SNK Vs. Capcom surprise release
![GameCentral Newsletter](https://metro.co.uk/wp-content/client-mu-plugins/metro-newsletters/signups/images/gamecentral-signup-logo.png)
Sign up to all the exclusive gaming content, latest releases before they're seen on the site.
Share this with