Happy's Humble Burger Cult

3/10, - found several bugs before even loading into the actual cooking/surviving round, NPCs not appearing when I joined a friend's hosted lobby and was able to walk through a door that was closed and impassable on my friend's screen. I then went on to fall out of the map as despite that area being significantly fleshed out with 15+ rooms of desks, beds, freezer equipment etc... some of the doors just led to the outside of the map. We also couldn't start a game as I would just get stuck at the bottom of the hole. Had to leave the server and this time let me host it and my friend join. - The cooking itself isn't that poorly done, while it might be unintuitive compared to other similar games its consistent and fair within the game itself, which is actually appreciated. However, it doesn't scale well with multiplayer, as very rarely does it feel like I'm working with my friend, as it was always easier to divide and conquer, which also had the side effect of keeping everyone in their own lane that kept the one potentially good thing that the multiplayer could add from coming into play, player collision, the first location is tightly packed and getting around up to an (expected) 3 other people could be quite a good way to make multiplayer chaotic and fun, but generally as long as everyone focuses on different things it seems rather rare to actually encounter this especially since later locations seem to just get bigger making this problem worse. Ironically, although everyone is encouraged to do something different, 90% of the time is just waiting on the one person doing the (last) burger. - The enemies encountered in a round run counter to the cooking, as the better you do at cooking the less enemies you will encounter, while the worse you do the more spawn only making it harder and harder, this means good players don't need to interact with entities as much as worse or less coordinated players as they will fill the quota with a higher simulation stability. Additionally it feels like actually dodging the enemies is more or less pointless as they didn't do much to actually affect cooking, just setting a fire here or there and giving mostly meaningless debuffs. The fact entities don't attempt to mess with the kitchen directly is weird, no taking ingredients out of inventories or off of partially done burgers, no turning on or off appliances, no stealing nuggets or pies out of the hotplates. Heck why are there no enemies that force you to divert cooking time to them instead. - Progression is mostly cosmetic, locations, and 1 time use consumables for meta progression, while individual shift streaks have contracts and the three optional challenges. To start with standard shift streak progression, each time you enter another shift you must accept a contract, these are either a singular upgrade or a singular downgrade, with no penalty for choosing upgrades instead of downgrades. The only reason upgrade contracts aren't always chosen is because one isn't always available. Why do the contracts not have both an upside and a downside, even if the downside is more extreme than the upside it still allows people to take on challenges and boons they want while not making the game as luck based. As for the three optional challenges, two just add an extra queue for orders making them basically the same, and the other allows customers to add exceptions to ordered burgers like no onions or no bbq sauce. This is a very good addition to the core gameplay loop, although the already confusing layout for the cash register gets even more confusing, and I would argue it should be in the base game without the need to enable the challenge (though much more rare than with the challenge. As for meta progression cash is mostly useless, as its only real use is going into the jar to level up for cosmetics and locations as the consumables are mostly useless since they take up precious inventory room and only help deal with entities (getting rid of debuffs or regaining stamina/hp), which is not worth the inventory slot and hassle. Neither of these means of progression change much about the core gameplay loop since locations don't seem to have major gimmicks that would make choosing to reroll an actual decision. However, I do think this game has potential. The focus on the mouse instead of the keyboard for interactions is very unique compared to a lot of other cooking games, and its got the basis for progression through higher and higher quotas. I would like to suggest making cash a non-meta progression currency that can be used in upgrades during the run, or, if contracts are to be made into an upside and downside, remove the tier system and allow players to directly buy cosmetics and make locations open up based on how high of a streak you currently have, while scrapping buyable consumables entirely to make players use the free ones they get during each shift even if its not exactly what they want. Additionally, based on what I've seen, I would like to suggest additions. The festival map should have a dj booth keeping an enemy at bay that gets angry if you don't change/replay the song often enough, scale the time it takes the song to end with the amount of players in the lobby (more = shorter) and put the dj booth a good distance from the rest of the kitchen. Additionally, some suggestions for contracts: unreliable supplies; every time someone grabs an item from an ingredients table or a fridge all items in the container swap positions randomly. limited RAM; when approaching a container all of the ingredients and their markers become indistinguishable from each other, this gradually decreases the longer the player is near the container, this would force the player to either remember, look as they approach, or wait for the effect to fade enough to make out which ingredient(s) they need. The visuals of this game are very impressive and are probably this game's strongest aspect at the moment, however as it turns out there is a voice incantation system that is mentioned to the player in a way that makes it sound more like filler text, it would be neat if certain maps and/or contracts made these incantations more helpful or harmful in various ways, however it doesn't seem helpful or harmful enough to be noticeable. Also the game is very loud, especially when the seemingly only deadly entity comes out to chase. I hope this game is allowed to improve as it has some really strong mechanics, however, in its current state I would suggest just buying Plate-Up instead as it does the rogue-lite chaotic cooking game genre better. Thank you for taking your time to read this way too long review.