Ever thought of running your own restaurant? I wouldn’t really recommend it, unless you enjoy running around all day and permanently smelling like food. But if it’s an idea you’d like, try running it along with a couple of mates in ‘PlateUp!’, a roguelike restaurant management game developed by It’s happening and published by Yogscast Games (indeed, the Yogscast). Alone or with up to three others, you will run an establishment that goes as long as you can make it—provided not a single customer gets cross. Lose and its game over, but it’s not all for naught, because that experience will make your next restaurant all the more successful.
Turn up the heat, it’s time to stay in the kitchen.
EntrepreneuRNG
PlateUp! is all about running a restaurant as perfectly as possible. Players will start off at HQ, where they can dress up, practise dish-making, and set up their next restaurant chain by selecting a randomly generated map and a recipe. You’ll journey through 15 days of trials and tribulations as you prepare your selected recipe, ring up customers, and try to keep your place as clean as possible. Everything you pick up needs to be placed on a table or a counter, which means you’ll need to manage just about everything you do lest a customer up ‘n leave, ending your run.
It sounds simple enough until you find yourself stuck in piles of goo left behind by those nasty beings called “customers”. Or when you find yourself out of dishes, having to wash them all one-by-one as foods burn on the hob and customers tap their fingers in waiting. Alone, this sort of gameplay ends up feeling more of a chore than fun. But with your friends, PlateUp! is an exercise in futility, potential aggravation, but also a lot of fun. I primarily played with my siblings and a bit of time alone and I vastly preferred the former, even with the roguelike aspects in play.
Since each restaurant is different, swapping locations of ingredients and appliances are key to success. You’ll learn how to best micromanage the details to quickly drop off plates of food and keep your place going. As the days go by, you’ll pick modifiers that can impact how you cook your dishes or add entirely new recipes to your menu, forcing you to adapt to the ever-increasing market changes. Blueprints will drop and you can buy useful equipment or store one of them you’ve yet to afford and you can always cycle through another set if the ones that dropped don’t suit your needs. Adding furniture after picking a restaurant focus can also pay more or keep customers patient, and more often than not I found the latter far more useful.
Cooking in this game is as easy as it gets. You have an interact and pick up button and that’s all you need to cut, knead, mix, and all that good stuff to get cooking. It’s important to keep an eye on your hobs and ovens, but PlateUp! use of audio cues and visual indicators is really well-done (hah!). When I burned something or when something caught fire, I could safely say it was my fault for getting my chores crossed. But I find that I enjoy PlateUp! best when its recipes don’t get too complicated. Mind, most of them aren’t difficult, per se, but some (like the steak and wine) had us opening the menu to check recipes multiple times during our playthroughs. But once you figure it out, you can run a whole place without even moving.
More often than not, we failed before we could get to day 15 but the game will give you extra equipment that you can take with you into your next run. And if you recycle three of them, you can create a potentially more useful appliance. It’s pretty addicting, and each time one of us said we’d stop playing, we’d jump into another round of restaurant-ing (and accidental roleplay). You can save up to five restaurant runs, which is great if you want to hop into another session without ruining your perfect streak.
PlateUp! is barrels of fun if you’re playing with friends or family. You’ll be barking orders to one-another before you know it. And even if you fail, you’ll find yourself starting another run in this fairly addicting cooking slash restaurant management roguelike. ∎
PlateUp!
Played on
Windows 11 PC, Xbox Series X
PROS
- Fun to play with friends!
- Solid controls and audio cues.
- Roguelike features fit well into the whole restaurant gig.
CONS
- Solo play is boring.
- Some recipes are more complex but don't pay as well as simpler ones.
So is this basically a Overcooked clone and if so are there any elements it does better/worse than Overcooked? That’s what I’m more interested in knowing about
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