when you decide to play cooking mama, you know what you're getting and this one isn't really any different.

there are a total of 60 dishes in the main gamemode, dojo/time trial levels upon silver medal completion, and 31 minigames that are not always cooking related (completing a dish unlocks a new minigame every so often). i played through every single minigame and main dish, and 100% gold-medaled all the main courses. i played some courses in dojo mode, but ultimately it was just doubling my time with this game for no reason so i stopped.

the main courses are OK. they are classic cooking mama, and are fun for a while before you realise there are a handful of techniques/cooking games they cycle between. there is a big issue with some unclear instructions or shoddy inputs that mean going for 100% is tedious. i discovered a trick in which if you know you are going to get a bronze/silver on a step during the dish, you can press start and quit and try the step again with no consequence on your score as long as the finished sign doesn't pop up which helped a lot. i think without it, i would have given up on going for full golds just because of how long the recipes get later in the game. if you enjoy cooking mama, this is no different. its fun, but after the first 10 recipes it really wore me down.

the minigames are... there? they exist? i dont know why they do, but they are definitely in the game! there are 4 separate categories of minigames being: help mama, harvesting, help mama's shop, and... studying? there are studying minigames where you solve basic arithmetic in thrilling gameplay like "1 + 1 = ?" and u are asked to fill in the missing numbers. this is a kids game, so i guess it makes sense to have them, but even for a child they are just so boring. there isn't a fun caricature of mama, it's literally just math problems on your ds. the other minigames are mostly fine like in the mama's shop portion, which has minigames like scooping ice cream for customers, taking orders and being a waiter, etc. they are a lot like old flash games, and are genuinely not bad. in help mama, you do household chores for her like sorting her thread spools, feeding her pet fish, and nursing baby birds to health. idk. its fine. the harvesting ones are about the same level of quality as the mama's shop games, and are pretty okay. playing catch to harvest fruit, sorting out green and red apples, collecting seafood from enemy crabs. they're okay and i played them all once or twice. the only real reason to play them is for what they unlock which is : decorations for mama's backdrop during the main courses and the main menu screen. that's... it. you don't even unlock the fun decorations after beating it/getting a perfect score. you have to get a perfect score on the minigame i think 3 times??? before you get a prize. its supposed to incentivize playing the minigames more, i understand, but it is so tedious if you DO want to unlock everything that there isn't really a point. the minigames are just kind of stupid. i didn't like their existence but i'm also probably not the target audience so who really cares in the end.

the final part of this game comes from the dojo or the time trial editions of the main recipes. once you beat the main recipe with a silver or gold, you unlock the dojo version of the dish. this mode means making the dish under a much tighter time constraint that generally doesn't allow for mistakes, which is actually a fun way to play the game. it is a lot more stressful, and definitely more annoying to 100% because of the timer aspect, but i liked playing a few levels of it. i already know that some recipes will be hell if you wanted to do it because of their tedious steps (the entire chicken tender/nugget recipe) (the step where you have to measure out foil/wrap for the food that brought nothing but pain and annoyance because of how sensitive the ranges are), but it was really fun. im not sure if this mode has a set of unlocks, but i beat a dish with a gold medal rating and it gave me nothing so... im going to assume you dont get any prizes. this was more fun for me than the base recipes, but it is also the same exact thing. i like challenges, and some of these levels were genuinely difficult with the close timings of them, but it was great! easily the best part of the experience for me.

so why did i play this game. did i even like it? to answer: i have no real clue. i like cooking mama, but actually beating everything was a chore. 60 recipes and their respective dojo levels AND the 30ish minigames on top of that is a lot to do, with little variability in the core dishes. you will experience the same egg cracking minigame a thousand times and it will be 0.1% less fun every time after that. i had a blast with the first 15 recipes, and then i thought "i must be halfway done." then i kept unlocking, and unlocking, and unlocking. maybe don't be like me and try speedrunning completion.

my rating of this game is: Just O.K.

I really wanted to like this game. I love roguelikes and I've had this one on my steam wishlist for a loooong while. I finally picked it up and I feel disappointed.

The gunplay in this game feels very reminiscent of revita and enter the gungeon, two really great games, but unfortunately the actual feel of the shooting is so awkward. the starting weapons don't just feel weak, they are boring and unfun. the few weapons i've unlocked and tried in my short experince with this game were equally unfun and uncomfortable to control. games like the binding of isaac provide a healthy balance right from the start, with cool unlocks being available from the very beginning with an equal amount of shitty items to balance it out. you can get lucky and have broken runs with brimstone or you can get stuck with tammy's head from the very beginning, but almost every upgrade will still feel like an upgrade. this is something neon abyss did not do well for me.

i have a few more issues with this game, too. the enemies are, frankly, not difficult ones just unfair and that largely is because of another issue i have with this game (we will circle back to enemies): the environments. every room just feels wayyy too big. most of the time, when you enter a chamber/room you cannot see everything, including enemies that have spawned into the level. this means random bullets spawning at you and enemies that peek, shoot, and then hide and teleport somewhere else in the room. it is so tedious and feels so slow to clear because of it. the level design is just unfun. everything in this game just boils back down to unfun. the combos in all the promotional material looks interesting and they have good concepts i like but havent made use for (you can disable individual items from appearing in runs if you hate them this much) but it is just too much of an unfun slog to get there.

quick side tangent: the buddy/egg hatching system is... it exists? i didnt hate it, but the infrequency of the hatches feels so lame. you just have to carry this trail of famiiars that do nothing. the hatches never felt significantly impactful. if done right, i think that protecting these akin to something like the lost soul item from the binding of isaac (familiar that you must protect each floor that will give an item upon progression) would work much better but otherwise is just so unsatisfying.

i WANT to like this game. the art is great and the mood of the environments feels cool, even if i think their tech aura is a bit corny. maybe one day i will revisit this and try to enjoy it, but as of now it is just not worth it when there are so many other amazing indie roguelikes that can provide you with so much more bang for your buck.

this game is so weird. everyone else has summarized it better than me in terms of "wow this is so chronically online, but it redeems itself sort of" but it's more than that. entering this girls dungeon that just reminds me so hard of your typical league-of-legends-playing-anime-loving-gun-obsessed-4-chan-user is almost immediately uncomfortable to me as someone who has met people like this and had the worst experiences. the true ending (?) is sort of sweet, with her realizing that being a degenerate NEET isn't really great after all, but she's just so unlikable before this point i can't believe i played it all the way through. idk. she's potentially trans and bisexual which would be cool except it's so minisculely hinted at it gives the same audience they're pandering too enough plausible deniability to ignore it. so its like. i mean i guess. only reason i wont give it a 1 is because i can understand her underlying autism coding and there was like a few minutes where i thought the character was pretty okay.