[h1]Flame-broiled, overcooked spuds[/h1]
In [i]Holy Potatoes?! What the Hell?![/i] you are a dead potato person, a chef in life. You land in Potato Hell as sous chef for a restaurant that serves to sort out potato people into their eternal torment.
Well, perhaps not so eternal. See, Potato Hell throws sinners, your fellow potato people, into appliances to be processed into meals for visiting deities. It's a bit like being Hannibal Lecter's personal chef.
Every serving day has three phases. Prep gives you a chance to bank some ingredients for the day before the gods get hungry. This is followed by Lunch and Supper, both of which play the same.
Each appliance corresponds to one of four basic sins: Malice, Pride, Greed, or Apathy. The stronger that particular sin is in that sinner, the better quality ingredient is produced by the tortured soul. Ingredients are graded as Okay, Good, or Epic, and is based on thresholds of the relevant sin. The better the ingredients, the better the dish is graded by the gods you serve.
Processing each soul takes a few seconds. Each appliance produces a different form of prepared tater: baked, mashed, boiled, and fried. Sins, appliances, and ingredients are linked by color and differentiated by different shapes and layout.
The gods will request dishes and you have to cook them. This isn't a game where you scramble to assemble the ingredients from their stations. If you have all the ingredients, you can make the dish with one click. A few seconds must pass for the dish to cook, just as with the processed sinners.
Requests are for specific recipes, specific ingredients, a minimum grade, or a specific reciepe with a specific minimum grade. Later, you gain salt, pepper, chili peppers, and honey from other appliances you throw souls into, and the gods will request that as well. You'll also gain a lab in which to research new recipes; you just need the right ingredients for them, with the better ones speeding up research time.
Fulfill a request, and the gods will then grant Favor. Fail to serve a dish that matches the request in time, and Favor is penalized. One form of objective requires you to have a certain amount of Favor stashed at the end of any day in the period.
Note, however, that upgrades to the appliances and elsewhere take some Favor to purchase, setting this objective back a bit.
Fail any objective, and it's game over. The game does offer an autosave at the beginning of each day, and manual save slots.
Fortunately, you will gain the ability to rescue or recycle failed dishes. A failed dish just gets stored for later use, and you can offer any dish that fits the bill, regardless of when you cooked it.
Or, you can use the other currency, $tarch, which is awarded to you upon the end of a day, calculated as a percentage of the Favor you earned during the day. Between chapters, you visit a store with various powerups. One set is some toppings that can boost the overall grade of a dish right before you serve it.
You also will soon be able to convert spare dishes into drinks to keep your godly guests happy a while longer. Serve enough drinks at a time, and the god will even forget their request.
Complications soon ensue as the gods slowly ramp up their minimum dish grade requirements, or more gods show up at once. Appliances will break down and need repairs, taking them out of commission for a while. Gods might ask for a dish you haven't researched yet.
Chapters are titled by Dante's Nine Circles of Hell. But there's no chapter theme based on the particular sin aside from naming parts within the chapter. Not even a PG-rated version of Lust is represented.
The storyline in this game has you and some new friends progressing through the Nine Circles in a bid for redemption to earn your way into Heaven. Also, you all have lost your memories of your life before the afterlife and regain them slowly over time.
Only your stored ingredients and known recipes carry over from one Circle to the next. Appliances will be reset to whatever the default is for that new Circle, and Favor is also reset.
Sometimes, a sinner will appeal to you to be spared and to work alongside you in the kitchen. Say yes, and you will get either a buff or a debuff. Starting in the third Circle, global events will affect the sin scores of incoming sinners for the duration of an objective.
Eventually, you have cookoffs between yourself and one of your coworkers in between chapters. The two of you cook two dishes, one for lunch and one for supper, with three guest judges scoring the dishes. These scores are based on ingredient quality and if they fit with the judges' preferences for that mealtime.
[b]Annoyances:[/b] (and why I am voting thumbs down on this)
It is waaaaayyy too easy for RNG to fail you. Sinners come one at a time, and you cannot move on until you sort the one you have. You can sort them into an appliance station, but that can mean being locked out of a better ingredient for a bit as precious seconds tick off. You can process new sinners as you cook for the gods, and can initiate actions when the game is paused, but even this wasn't enough for me. I barely managed to get into the Fourth Circle.
The bigger problem is that the objectives have only three game days to complete. That's not a lot of time to create the better ingredients that the dish grades demand. The toppings go only so far in boosting a dish's grade. It felt as if the powerups were mandatory instead of optional -- and I never bothered to invest in them, just the toppings. And that store is not available during the objectives.
It's also not a lot of time to build up the Favor needed to both win some objectives and spring for the upgrades that will benefit you.
Minor GUI bug: I was busy upgrading stations when the day ended and it threw me into a cutscene. On the other side, the GUI was gone. Fortunately, good ol' ESC took me back to the menu, where I could load the recent autosave.
