One-armed cook: Gravity-defying mechanics, fires and dissatisfied customers

As the name tells, you play as a one-armed cook, in single-player or multiplayer with up to four players. You’ll get to take orders, make the food, serve customers, clean the dishes and, order more ingredients when needed. With these, and some rats and occasional fires, the chaos is ensured in this cooking simulation. With different objectives and time limits, the game gives you something to work towards with your friends.

In the game, you can choose what restaurant you want to run. There are options from hamburgers to Mexican food to even ice cream. Different types of foods make sure you learn new recipes to keep customers happy. The diversity also gives you the choice of making what you fancy or what works out the best. From my experience, it is a lot easier to make hotdogs where you only have to grill the sausage and the bun instead of building a five-ingredient sandwich or handling the deep fryer.

 

The game setting itself is small. In every restaurant, there’s a kitchen space and an area for customers. You can also go outside to unload your ordered ingredients. There could easily be more space to make the experience a bit more enjoyable, since sometimes when passing your friend, you both end up getting stuck in the doorway.

The gameplay itself isn’t so smooth, which is meant to be a part of the game. Everything has its own mechanics in the game, often defying gravity in some way. For example, with just a small touch the plates can fly all over and then get stuck in the roof. This leads to, of course, the clanking sound constantly coming from over your head. Placing things down or holding them the right way is also made difficult. It’s not uncommon for everything you had on the plate to spread around or things to fall way too easily. When you have to order more tomato sauce for the pizza after your friend knocked the can over the third time, you start to question whether you should play the game at all, or if you should get a different friend instead.

When plating the ingredients you have to have patience. As with everything in the game, this isn’t made easy either. While trying to run a pizzeria, most of the time went trying to get the pizza on the plate and to get the toppings to stay on it. I’ll admit it did take many tries and lots of toppings glitching themselves stuck in the air. The components won’t automatically place themselves into their place either. For example, when making a sandwich you’ll often end up with a pile of ingredients that look like they’ll fall over any second.

 

 

The fires did cause headaches every time. When you forget something in the oven or the deep fryer even for a bit too long, a fire will start. Luckily you have fire extinguishers on hand. Just be ready to spend the next five minutes fighting against the fire and trying to get it extinguished. If you don’t find the cause, it’ll just catch fire again. Rats are also a common occurrence if you have any food on the floors. They’ll steal your ingredients, and in addition, the customers will complain about them.

Regardless of all the setbacks, the game can entertain, but it also can make you frustrated and unmotivated when nothing goes your way. It was a fun way to spend some time, but I wouldn’t play it too often since it loses its appeal with the repetition and inability to be serious. If you want to succeed in this game, you’ll need to have a lot of patience and perhaps a good strategy on how to handle the cooking and serving with your friends. But one thing is for sure, it makes you laugh.

 

Basic info:

Publisher: Duhndal
Developer: Duhndal
Platforms: PC
Release Date: 30.8.2022
Genres: Simulation, casual, free-to-play

Photos: screenshots from One-Armed Cook, taken by the author

 

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