Game: Debut Project: Cooking Cafe
Genre: Action, Simulation
System: Steam (Windows) (also available for Nintendo Switch)
Developers | Publishers: GrooveBoxJapan | D3PUBLISHER
Controller Support: Full
Steam Deck: Not Verified
Price: US $29.99 | UK £24.99 | € 29,99
Release Date: November 13th, 2024
A review code was used, and many thanks to D3PUBLISHER.
Debut Project: Cooking Cafe is a cooking simulation title with an anime theme. You are a cute anime girl who was hired to work at a new cafe. Your job is to take orders and cook them for customers.
Adorable Cooking and Decorating
So, the basic cycle of how you play Debut Project: Cooking Cafe begins with customers coming into the shop. They have an item you know how to make floating above their heads. You click on the one you want to make, go through the mini-games to put the item together or cook it, and then the game takes a photo of it and posts it to social media. The better you complete the mini-games, the more likes you get for the dish.
Some customers will ask for specific things, but others will want you to make something that fits a hashtag. For example, you might get a tag like #fullOfFruit, and you have to pile a bunch of extra fruit on whatever recipe you make for them. You also eventually unlock the ability to create your own unique recipes. You serve about two to four customers a day, and you have four work days in a month.
Each month, you’ll have a variety of quests to complete, like creating a certain number of drink dishes, creating new menu items, serving a certain number of hashtag guests, or getting a certain number of likes on social media. Fulfilling these quests doesn’t seem to do much except make it more likely you’ll get a bunch of likes and subs on your next photo for social media.
There will also eventually be Owner’s Challenges, which are basically game-long quests like making 30 pancake dishes, coming up with a number of different new dishes, and reaching higher Flavor Ranks. With each Flavor Rank, you will get access to new dishes, new recipes, remodelling, more customers, and stuff like that.
The Look of Debut Project: Cooking Cafe
Debut Project: Cooking Cafe is probably one of the cutest games I’ve seen in a while. The anime aesthetic is gorgeous, and everything about this game is super adorable. Everything is in these kinds of soft, pastel colors with a kind of Animal Crossing Cafe look to it; it’s hard not to absolutely fall in love with the look and feel.
The music and sound design could be better, but it’s not bad. The music adds to the cutesy aesthetic, but it does get a little repetitive. The sounds are rough, especially if you play with headphones; some of the menuing noises are very grating after a while. Thankfully, Debut Project: Cooking Cafe put in volume sliders for each set of sounds, so I was able to turn it down very easily.
The adorable look of my little cafe was furthered by how cute the recipes were. One pancake had little candy eyes and an ice cream snout to make it look like a little bear or dog. There were heart-shaped, pink pancakes with swirls of cream and covered in kiwi cut and shaped to look like flowers. There were little hotdogs cut in the shape of octopuses, and you could even write on people’s food with condiments like ketchup and caramel.
Kind of a Little Boring
Sadly, the Debut Project: Cooking Cafe is a little boring. I think it might be for slightly younger audiences, and the game, therefore, introduces new concepts pretty slowly. It took about two hours to get to the point where I could unlock making my own recipes, and I had to make a lot of the same recipes over and over to get to that point. The only time it wasn’t a little boring was when I was trying to learn how to do a new thing live; there is no practice, so you need to give your cooking to the customer, no matter how badly it turns out because the quick tutorial didn’t quite explain it right for my brain.
But after learning what buttons to hit for the recipe you are trying to do, you end up just doing the same dishes over and over. It feels a lot like a simplified Cooking Mama-type game with a beautiful look and feel. When I first saw this title, I was hoping for more of an Animal Crossing DLC-type designer game that I could decorate the space between serving up customers.
Also, I thought it was super odd that I could only wait on two customers per day for the first couple of hours. When I finally unlocked being able to wait on three people a day, it seemed like a big difference, though it still made the gameplay really slow. There are always menus and/or cutscenes at the beginning and end of each day, so it would have made more sense just not to have a closing time, letting you run wild with your creations.
An Annoying Glitch
I didn’t see really anything wrong with Debut Project: Cooking Cafe; for the most part, I could play without having any issues at all. However, actually putting extra toppings on your creations is a little glitchy. Sometimes it pulls things off of what you are working on just because your mouse got kind of close to it, and sometimes it will replace what you were working with to something nearby. It was a little obnoxious, but I managed to work around it for the most part.
Other than that, Debut Project: Cooking Cafe seems to be really well put together; I had no other issues with bugs or weird gameplay, no crashing, etc.
Conclusion
Overall, Debut Project, Cooking Cafe, was fine. It’s a cute game with a great aesthetic. The sound design is okay, the gameplay is fine, but things move along very slowly. There isn’t much to do outside of cooking, and the cooking mini-games are all kind of mid. It’s pretty cute and fun, but I think it’s a little boring. A little vanilla, if you will.
It’s fun, it’s cute, and it’s a great idea for a game. I just wish there was a little more. I would have been much happier if there had been a designer element to Debut Project: Cooking Cafe, like hanging up pictures, choosing paint colors, or picking out the decor. I think this would have elevated this title a lot. But my overall opinion of it is that it’s just fine.
Final Verdict: I Like it.
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