The cute little question “what game world would you like to live in?” always leaves me stumped. I wouldn't want to live in Thedas or Tamriel, and honestly, I'm not sure there would be anything appealing about Stardew Valley's Pelican Town if I didn't also get free and clear title to a farm to go with it. From now on, I'll say I want to live in Grat, the cozy seaside town of Magical Delicacy where cat princesses and amphibian administrators order canapes from witches.
The basics of Magical Delicacy are as follows: Flora, a new witch in town, takes over a shop where you can set up cooking stations like an oven, cauldron, and skillet to create foods ranging from stew to fruit crumble. You can travel around town to forage for ingredients, plant them in your small garden, or purchase rare finds from merchants. In the shop, you'll cook dishes either following a recipe or experimenting to balance the flavors of each ingredient with the preferences dictated by the person who requested it. The story of Grat and Flora's involvement in this shop develops as you explore more of the town and meet the dietary needs of the townspeople.
It's seasoned with flavors of popular cozy games like animal citizens, slightly sarcastic witches, a bit of gardening, and plenty of accessibility settings. Still, I think it'll suit the palate of many cozy gamers. It's just missing a little secret sauce for me.
Well seasoned
I love seaside town settings, but even if I didn’t, Magical Delicacy would have been instantly charming. I could hum its main theme to you right now, with its offbeat oboe melody, swelling strings, and a touch of accordion. The rest of its sound design is delightful, too: the stocky baker makes a deep boom Boom as she speaks while the delicate cat princess is in a high-pitched voice pee pee.
In its colorful, pixelated world, birds soar overhead as plants sway in the wind. Each character is packed with personality, right down to the way my mysterious roommate impatiently balances on his tiptoes as he stands in the shop. I even love his speech bubbles, which is a weird thing to focus on, but I often have a problem with interfaces that don’t mesh with the rest of a game’s visual design, and Magical Delicacy pairs as naturally as salami and cheese sticks.
It seems excessive to dwell on the drapery, but as a lover of warm games, I think it is important to recognize the power of vibrations and that the magical delicacy is undeniable.
Flavor without garnish
I played Magical Delicacy for about 10 hours and what I wish I had understood in the first hour was to not think of it as a shopping or life simulation. at allIt contains familiar elements of both: collecting or farming ingredients, managing inventory, purchasing new cooking stations, and selling some of my creations from Flora's shop.
But still, it's not really a simulation and is better approached as a narrative adventure that also features cooking and platforming. There's a kind of plot brewing in Grat. The queen is often sick, helped by local witches whose Flora finds herself embroiled in quarrels over a mysterious egg. The story is the point, not a backdrop as it might be in a more about running the store. And yet, cooking and exploring make up the bulk of what I do at any given moment so far, with dialogue playing a less important role.
Cooking is pretty straightforward. I press X to interact with one of my cooking stations, choose a few ingredients from my menu, and hold X to craft, waiting for a small timed bar to fill up until I can pick up what I've made. Every now and then, there's a little timed button-pressing mini-game, the same one I use to scavenge for ingredients around town. As for platforming, some parts get a bit tricky (though there are accessibility settings to make it easier) with timed platforming and acrobatic jumps.
At the beginning, the princess’s bodyguard wants me to make her a snack: a pastry of sorts, avoiding sweet flavors and using only common ingredients. My inventory of 30 items seems rather small given that five braided wheat and two red roots count as seven items, not two. It’s unclear how the flavors of the ingredients impact the final taste of the dish, and experimenting with combinations feels like a waste of my collected stock. Instead, my goal is to explore the city in the hopes of spotting a recipe in a shop or looting one from a small chest somewhere that will fit these constraints. It’s more about solving the puzzle of each request using the right recipe and ingredients than playing around in the hopes of creating something on my own.
Time of day plays a minor role in Flora's objectives. Some areas are more easily accessible at night, when glowing purple platforms appear to help me reach them, while some potions must be brewed by moonlight. But I don't have an energy meter, calendar, or other means of time management to dictate each day.
Money is a resource I have to manage, and I can put meals up for sale in my shop window as I walk around to earn more outside of quests. But I'm not really encouraged to make money or customize my shop for the sake of it. It's always a way to fulfill the next recipe request to advance the story. It took me a little longer than I care to admit to realize that experimenting with recipes or exploring wasn't really going to be inherently rewarding, and that I needed to stay focused on the meal requests I could fulfill next.
Now that I understand it, what I want from Magical Delicacy is a slightly stronger feedback loop between all of its activities. I'd like for completing a quest to naturally lead me to unlocking a new area of town where I find a new type of ingredient that's the answer to another recipe puzzle that rewards me with a new cooking station that unlocks new recipes, etc. This happens from time to time, but I often find myself stuck in a dead end, unsure which of my quests are currently dead ends and which are the way forward. I've gotten several quests early on, for example, that required using a cauldron, hours before I even got a quest that I thought might reward this new tool.
This feeling of failure prevented me from having the motivation to return to it night after night, as other simulation games can do. As a dish, Magical Delicacy has a lot of flavor, but it didn't fill me up. “Style over substance,” if I had to put it in Paul Hollywood's jargon. But I do it. Really I like the style.
