Fresh off the boat comes a young witch by the name of Flora, who sets out to find her place in the world as one of the few witches remaining. It doesn’t take long for her to become acquainted with the vertical city and landscape of Grat, where she makes her bread and butter in developer sKaule and publisher Whitethorn Games’ ‘Magical Delicacy’. This 2D cooking slash Metroidvania title bathes in cosiness and comfort as you meet the folks of Grat, find ingredients, and build out your arsenal of cooking utensils and witchcraft equipment.
It’s beautiful as it looks—but Magical Delicacy will eat a lot of your time.
Once off the boat and a few platform jumps later, Flora is introduced to her new humble abode given to her for “free”, strings attached. Upon suddenly being saddled with a debt she can pay off whenever, she also finds a roommate already bundled up inside—Hina, this blonde-haired vagabond, has no intention of leaving, but she does end up becoming a good ally for Flora as she encourages her to check out the town and all of its crumbling glory.
Beautiful and weird, Grat is an island of homes and shoppes built upon one another, making up a labyrinth of a city. To add to that, a lot of the platforms will crumble upon being touched, making me wonder how the average person manages to even get around. But there’s a lot of details hidden all over that really make the island shine, the pleasant score playing a role in that as well. And I quite liked the citizens of Grat. Charming as they can be tedious with their relentless orders, they make some good jokes and get along with Flora quite well. Flora herself more or less takes every compliment and blow with a simple “Great”. She’d make a fine cashier in another life.
Grat is also home to an assortment of leafy greens, mushrooms, and everything you need to make food. And Magical Delicacy will make sure to keep you busy as you quickly rack up orders and find all sorts of plants and spices to make stuff out of. The game will have you combine these and, depending on the rarity and flavour of the ingredients used, you can get all sorts of combinations of foods and potions to make your deliveries and even sell from the window of your shoppe. You also have a garden to work with, which can help make procuring ingredients much more easier, as the bulk of your time will be spent finding the right ingredients to make your recipes.
Exploring Grat is also key in your witch training. This is where Magical Delicacy’s Metroidvania focus comes into play as you discover secret locations, unlock new parts of the map by finding power-ups that are scattered all over, and complete quests. Platforming in this game is a little odd as movement is sometimes restricted by being on certain inclines or some moving platforms. Heck, many times you’ll find yourself unable to open the map or any menus when in these situations and the game will make no mention of this fact as I slightly gorilla’d my ROG Ally thinking my buttons were going bad.
Magical Delicacy is kind of an oddball. It’s a game that, at first glace, seems to be this cosy take-your-time adventure as a spring chicken (more witch, really). And it does do that to an extent, I think the best times I had with this game were making foods and goods and the occasional platforming challenge provided by the several catacombs scattered across Grat. But everything in-between, where I would have to constantly find new ingredients due to mishaps, wait for the time-of-day to change, and even the platforming itself were fairly uninteresting.
See, orders will sometimes ask for particular tastes. And getting a recipe done right can take a bit of trial and error at first. Magical Delicacy encourages you to experiment and rarely holds your hand, which I appreciate quite a bit. It plays into the role of discovery that Flora finds herself in, but making monies can take a while and ingredients can be hard to come by. You’ll have to wait for them to regrow on the island or find a merchant that carries what you want. More often than not, I would idle away as I waiting for these valuable ingredients to regrow so I can continue progressing through the game world. There’s also a timing-related minigame required to pull out herbs and the like, but you can turn it off in the game’s settings. After a minute of trying that out, it was one of the first checkboxes to get ticked.
And then we go from cooking to the platforming. Like I said earlier, Magical Delicacy has a lot of platforms that collapse on contact or are only available during moonlight. This limits your ability to get to certain places early on and you’ll likely end up waiting a lot for these platforms to regenerate. Falling off the grid simply resets you back to the ledge you jumped off, making me wonder why these traps are here to begin with. The catacombs too, make this game go from ‘comfy cooking’ to briefly challenging platforming puzzles. I liked these brief challenges but I couldn’t help but wonder why these were here to begin with—I ultimately felt like the platforming didn’t add much to the experience.
Magical Delicacy has a strong set of accessibility options that can help gameplay progression, however. From platforming simplification to removal of quick-time events to even UI scaling and typeface changes, there’s a lot of options here that I really appreciate seeing as they’re not always common functions in games.
Magical Delicacy is a beautiful albeit tedious 2D Metroidvania. It’s fun is hampered by clunky platforming and resource management that get in the way of what I want to be—a witch that can cook, not a scavenger. ∎
Magical Delicacy
Played on
Windows 11 PC
PROS
- Beautiful visuals and music.
- Cooking and finding new recipes is fun!
- Charming cast of characters and interesting lore.
CONS
- Lots of idling for resource respawns.
- Platforming clashes with the other half of the game in a way that's not fun.
