[ May update when completed ]
For now im having a blast, been w8ing for this title for so long!
I think its a really brilliant idea to combine roguelike gameplay with facility management, gathering ingredients wchich depends on the quality of ur run makes it a fair exchange
And obv the gaame's adorable! Characters are really cute and likeable, Aider especially~
Im glad the game turned out to be a nice title i can spend my little free time with

There's the skeleton of a good game here, but Cuisineer fails to deliver in the ways that matter. Dungeons are fun but aimless, and they flood you with way more loot than you can actually carry. Restaurant management starts off extremely slow and is terribly underdeveloped. The balancing between dungeon runs and restaurant running is also completely shot, you'll spend one day in a dungeon and then need to spend over a week selling that food in your restaurant to clear out room in your fridge.

As far as I've been able to tell, what you're serving also barely matters. I get the impression the game wants you to run between multiple dungeons to pick up different kinds of ingredients to make more complex dishes, but in practice you can just pick up everything, slam it all in the fridge, and you'll have no issues. There's no menu management and townsfolk never get tired of eating the same thing every day.

Cuisineer is a fun game that mixes elements from a few different other games. In this game, you're a cook that goes hunting for food to serve it to your customers. The restaurant management reminds me a lot of moonlighter, whereas the exploration part is similar to a roguelite version of Rune Factory.

The game is pretty fun but it's honestly flawed all over the place and there's a lot that could be improved. The balance of the game especially doesn't make any sense at all. I just can't understand some things, like why the most basic tutorial messages only appear at Day TWENTY (and that’s only first the very first one) to tell you useful info that should have been explained right away and which you probably figured out on your own in the meantime. It's the same for everything in the game, from some systems like weapon upgrading being seemingly useless to the amount of resources required being too much or too little, to the difficulty of the restaurant management... The game is still fun though but it would be a top contender of the genre for me if it was more focused.

The start is extremely slow with a lot of things left unexplained until way too late and systems that sort of discourage experimentation. For example, brewing costs 500 coins and there's no explanation for how it works until you try it out a few times to understand it. It's actually a pretty cool system but it's too expensive (the devs lowered the cost to 100 now thankfully), it takes your weapon away for one day and you don't have any idea what the weapon mods do either, nor are you informed that brewing will lock one slot forever. It also takes quite a fortune to acquire your first weapons.

The game made me actually believe I'd quickly be given one equipment of each type, because every new area gives you a new weapon and paying the debt gives you one piece of armour. But guess what? It took me over ten hours to pay the second debt and get... basic boots, something I already bought and dropped in dungeons for a good ten hours as well. Eventually you get a lot of weapons just from running the dungeon but they're mostly useless and the way the equipment mods work, I find that nearly every piece of equipment I obtain is unneeded. You can't even sell them so it really feels like cumbersome junk, especially considering that they take inventory slots.

This creates a displeasing gameplay loop where you don't even want to go any further than needed in dungeons. Why go beat a boss when my inventory is full? I only get the same materials as normal monsters and random equipment which is no better than checking the daily sales of the smith. I don't even get money and can't sell them, thus there's never any incentive to beat a boss. All you get is an achievement for beating them once and one quest requires you to beat floor 6 of the first dungeon, that's it! This part of the game could really be improved.

As for dungeoning itself, it's the best part of the game. The combat is solid and the maps, albeit a bit repetitive in patterns you can start to recognise (the dungeons are essentially a random arrangement of pre-made rooms) are beautiful and fun. Still, there are once again many flaws. My biggest gripe is probably how the cooldown of special attacks is so long, thus making the combat pretty monotonous as you can only spam the same basic attacks for most of the time. It would have also been a great addition to be able to switch between the two weapons you can equip, instead of only having one main weapon and the second slot being used for the special attack. A few more special attacks would have really made this game into a very awesome dungeon crawler.

That aside, the combat is tight there's no denying it. A lot of the bosses are fun and special mention to the second boss of the snow area which is straight up awesome. It's too bad the game doesn't really reward you for beating them. On another hand, the mobs can get annoying sometimes: the rice sprites are just about everywhere which really gets tedious at some point, especially considering how 1) they're so small you can hardly track them 2) they get hyper armour from their buffs and thus can easily destroy your crowd control. Hell, they can literally become immortal if two rice priests are buffing them and it's hard to notice. Oftentimes the combat can get really messy with many enemies and the screen being unreadable and this is where a few more special attacks would have shined.

As for the restaurant, it is also very unbalanced. First of all, running the restaurant an entire day (which is pretty much required) is twenty minutes!!! This is insane compared to a game like Dave the diver where this part of the game is very short (and also, unlike here, very involved with the player being actively tasked to do things). It's long and mostly very boring, especially at the beginning. For most of my ten hours of play, I never had enough customers to fill the restaurant and be busy and now that I have upgraded it to the maximum level and almost gotten max reputation, only now do I get to actively play the restaurant. This took me about 15 hours!!! And this is only during three times of the day (lunch, afternoon tea and dinner) during which customers are increased, the rest of the day is still very calm with perhaps two to three customers at once. This part is very obviously flawed.

The restaurant gameplay is very simple and could be improved too, but overall it's pretty good for what it is, if only you had enough customers. It doesn't require much thinking and doesn't offer much in the way of management but it's still fun to run and watch. Still, a game like Dave the diver really shows a lot of things that Cuisineer could have taken inspiration from. There's also a tight balance between dungeoning to get resources and running the restaurant which... also is pretty messy. Throughout the whole game I had way too much flour and rice (they're everywhere...) and I was mostly fine with most ingredients, but some of them like the pork and beef meat as well as cheese are extremely difficult to obtain because the enemies dropping them only appear in specific areas and are rare. Yet they end up being the most prized ingredients for your recipes and endgame recipes can even use five pieces of meat at once! One dungeon run would give me about twenty pieces of the ingredient I needed!!!

Finally, while the game introduces itself like a farming sim with a clock, a town with villagers to talk to… All of that aspect is extremely superficial. The dialogue is extremely uninteresting be it optional dialogues or the main quest which resumes itself to “pay your debt”. The villagers don’t react to anything you do, not even beating bosses for example and every side quest is structured the same way where they give you a random situation requiring you to find them an item and then explain what’s great about the recipes they’re giving you, but it doesn’t feel very convincing to read that part either and the repeated structure just gets previsible and boring, very fast. There’s very little to do in town other than buying things and completing your quests. There are birthdays, but it seems only two people a month (so eight in total) get to have a birthday out of all villagers and having them give you gifts instead of you doing it seems like a convenient way that the developers scrapped a planned social aspect. As for the clock, it really doesn’t matter : there’s little point to only running the restaurant for half a day and it doesn’t matter any more when you go dungeoning, because you get an unlimited amount of time and come back at 11pm. The clock could have been more useful if for example your dungeoning time was limited or you could come back and forth, for example dungeoning during the calm morning and coming back for the lunch rush. Once again, I think Dave the diver figured out a great way to handle this with days being separated into multiple parts and getting to do one action per part. Here, the clock is essentially the countdown until you close your restaurant.