Game review: Overcooked

I have saved the best for last. Previously I've reviewed every other game I played at the gaming marathon for SpecialEffect. We saw Poo, Tsuro and Ricochet Robots; Love Letter, Forbidden Island, King of Tokyo and Dobble; Towerfall, Monaco and Nidhogg; and Rock Band, Nintendoland and Sports Friends. Finally, we have Overcooked.

Overcooked is a co-op cookery game. Specifically, it's about preparing the ingredients, cooking them, serving them and cleaning the dirty plates. Under adversity. Your kitchen might be spanning a busy road, sundered by earthquakes, divided between moving vehicles, plagued by rats or even haunted. Somehow you need to coordinate up to four cooks to perform the necessary tasks without stepping on each others' toes.

While you can play a single-player mode where you control two cooks and swap between them, it's pretty painful and clearly supplementary to the main focus of the game, the co-op mode. Each player controls a separate cook. Anyone can undertake any task, but the trick is to figure out how best to divide your efforts. The ingredients start in the ingredient bins, need to get to the chopping boards for chopping or mincing, to the pot, pan or fryer for cooking, and assembled onto a plate and delivered to the dining room. The dirty plates need to get to the sink for washing. While each task is a simple case of mashing a button or simply waiting, you'll soon find that the difficulty is being in the right place at the right time.

A successful kitchen teeters precariously between two states: chaos and gridlock. In chaos, everyone does their own thing with no coordination. Stuff gets done, slowly. People make long trips across the length of the kitchen to fetch single ingredients or find a clean plate. People trip over each other and slow each other down. The wrong orders are delivered. Useless ingredients pile up. Conversely, in gridlock, everyone has a job, they stick to it and all end up waiting for one person to chop more tomatoes. The right order might be delivered, but probably too late.

Somehow you need to have a clear enough plan that nobody steps on anyone else's toes, but that's flexible enough to adapt to bottlenecks or developing crises. Somebody needs to keep a clear enough head that you only prepare the ingredients you actually need for the orders, and don't waste your time chopping mountains of tomatoes that will never be eaten. You need to communicate enough to understand what needs to be done, but not so much everyone is shouting at once. And of course you need to avoid collapsing into fits of laughter as another perfect plate of fish and chips slides across the ice and into the freezing river, or an entire kitchen van burns to ashes since whoever was supposed to be watching the frying pan mistimed a jump and got stuck in the wrong van.

I love that this game rewards a good plan. It's at its best when you fail abysmally at a level and spend the next five minutes trying to diagnose what went wrong. Who was overworked? Who was underworked? Where were ingredients piling up unused? What was actually delivered? Was it a good plan that you just need to execute better, or do you need to change tactics? You come up with a new division of labour and you try again. It's the best kind of teamwork. A large part of the game is entirely external to the actual playing of the game. It's in how you communicate and strategize between levels.

If you have somebody to play this with, get this game. It's couch co-op only – no network play. You only need the one copy, but you do need friends who can actually come round to your house and you do need controllers for them. But if you have the friends and you have the controllers, you need to experience this game. It's funny, it's messy, it's charming. It will make you into a team.

That's it, that's all the reviews. Thank you so much to everyone who supported me to raise money for SpecialEffect, who help people with physical disabilities to have fun with the family and friends playing video games with specially adapted equipment. And if you didn't donate before, it's still not too late now. Thanks for reading. Play these games.