Balatro meets breakfast? This 'chaotic cooking roguelike' where you make omelets for picky customers and try not to enrage a giant chicken just launched on Steam
Now that I've put aside Balatro (for now) and Blue Prince (for now), I'm on the lookout for the next creative and unusual roguelike. And I may have just found it: at Wholesome Games Direct today, there was a trailer for Omelet You Cook, a game where you make breakfast for a series of picky customers and try to avoid making your boss angry.
Your boss is a massive chicken named Principal Clucker, by the way. And he doesn't like you very much.
And here's the really good news: if you like the look of the trailer below, Omelet You Cook is out in early access on Steam right now.
I've played it a bit this week, and I'm pretty smitten with the lo-fi looks and surprisingly challenging cooking system. You'll begin with a conveyor belt of ingredients and an omelet to add those ingredients to, and an eager customer who demands you make them breakfast that scores over a certain point threshold. The ingredients slide in front of you and you pick one to add to the omelet, then get three more to choose from, and so on.
Each ingredient has a point value and some synergize with each other. Green peppers, for instance, are worth zero points alone, but each slice of bacon touching one awards you three extra points. Mushrooms are worth a whopping seven points—as long as absolutely nothing is touching them. As your omelet fills up with ingredients, it becomes almost like a stacking or packing game. How much can you cram on top of this omelet while maximizing your score?
Omelet customers can be quite demanding: imagine facing a new boss blind in Balatro not every three rounds but every single round and you'll have some idea of the challenges you face. One customer gave me a negative multiplier for every piece of meat in the omelet, which was a problem because I was going with a bacon-heavy strategy in that session. Another customer was a DJ, which meant the omelet slowly spun while I was trying to assemble it: that made it really tricky to arrange my ingredients just so.
Even the ingredients themselves can be tricky. Between rounds I spent some of my earnings to buy seafood to use in my omelets, which have a chance to be "wiggly." A squid suddenly beginning to squirm around and nudge other ingredients out of place can be a problem if you're dealing with a customer who requests that no ingredients be hanging off the side of the omelet.
It's compelling, though! Unlike a lot of roguelikes where I shrug and start over when I fail, I find myself deeply invested in crafting omelets that will please customers and avoid me getting yelled at by the massive, angry chicken I work for.
If you don't score enough points, Principal Clucker will appear, gobble down all the omelets you made, lay some heavy criticism on you ("This is pathetic."), and end your game. On the plus side, if you get far enough he'll grant you a new ingredient that may appear in future sessions.
I'll be right back: I'm gonna cook up some more omelets and make that giant chicken proud. You'll find Omelet You Cook on Steam.