TroytlePower

While we were camping last weekend, my wife and I wanted something to play on the Switch that was a little more goal driven than Mario Kart and easier to play in tabletop mode than Hyrule Warriors. We settled on Overcooked, a game we had only played a few levels of before on the PS4, and that I had totally forgotten I had purchased for the Switch as well.

We played a bit that night, and decided that while it was playable on the Switch’s screen, we’d probably have way more fun with it on a tv. This weekend, we hooked it all up, and started working through the story mode.

We have gotten up to world 5, and it’s been ridiculously entertaining!

For those who haven’t played it, Overcooked puts you and up to three friends in to a cartoony kitchen as muppet-esque characters, and has you fill orders for soups, burgers, pizza, and more by gathering ingredients, chopping them up, cooking what needs to be cooked, plating, and serving. If you get an order out quickly you get bonus points, while taking too long causes a severe penalty. Oh, and also sometimes a rat steals your food, or ghosts move things around, or your whole kitchen tilts and counters slide to new places.

Or sometimes your wife can’t figure out how to set down an onion to take a pot off the stove, so she yells, “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry” as the whole kitchen catches fire.

It’s chaotic and colorful and fun, and it really encourages communication, coordination, and cooperation. It is a fantastic multiplayer experience.

Because so much of the game depends on getting food out fast, it also pushes you to come up with ways to eliminate downtime, which led us to our ABCs of Overcooked, “Always be chopping!” Almost every ingredient in the game needs to be cut up before it can be used, so we decided that whenever there was downtime, we’d start chopping whatever we could find.

And then, a magical thing happened.

We went to the kitchen (our real one) to make dinner. My wife had gotten everything we needed to make pizza (I’m really not good at this no bread thing), including some pre-made-but-not-rolled dough. I was assigned the task of rolling it out, but, oh no, it has to sit for 30 minutes before you can roll it.

This meant we had to sit around and wait for 30 minutes.

Of down time.

So, you know what we did?

We started chopping.