The cute little icebreaker "which game world would you want to live in?" always stumps me. I wouldn't want to live in Thedas or Tamriel and honestly I'm not sure if there'd be anything enticing about Pelican Town of Stardew Valley if I didn't also get the free and clear deed to a farm to go with it. From now on, I'll say I want to live in Grat, the cozy seaside city of Magical Delicacy where feline princesses and amphibian administrators commission canapés from witches.
The basics of Magical Delicacy are this: New witch in town Flora is taking over a shop where you can install cooking stations like an oven, cauldron, and skillet to create foods from ragout to fruit crumble. You can platform around town to forage for ingredients, plant them in your small garden, or buy rare finds from merchants. In the shop, you'll cook dishes either by following a recipe or experimenting to balance the flavors of each ingredient and preferences dictated by the person who requested it. The story of Grat and Flora's involvement there develops as you explore more of the town and fulfill the food needs of the locals.
It's seasoned with popular cozy game flavors like animal citizens, slightly snarky witches, a bit of gardening, and lots of accessibility settings. For all that I think this will suit the palate of lots of cozy gamers. It's missing just a little secret sauce for me.
Well-seasoned
I'm a sucker for a seaside town setting but even if I weren't, Magical Delicacy would have been immediately charming. I could hum its main theme for you right now off the top of my head with its quirky oboe melody, swelling strings, and a dash of accordion. The rest of its sound design is delightful, too: the stocky baker makes a deep bloop bloop as she talks while the dainty cat princess is a high pitched wee wee.
In its colorful pixelated world birds fly overhead while plants sway in the wind below as I walk by. Every character is crammed with personality right down to the way my mysterious housemate impatiently rocks on the balls of their feet while standing around the shop. Heck, I even love its dialogue balloons, which is a weird thing to fixate on but I often have a bone to pick with interfaces that don't gel with the rest of a game's visual design and Magical Delicacy is paired as naturally as salami and cheese sticks.
It seems excessive to dwell on the drapery, but as a cozy game enjoyer I think it's important to recognize the power of vibes and Magical Delicacy's are undeniable.
Flavor without filling
I'm about 10 hours into Magical Delicacy and the thing I wish I realized in the first hour was to not think of it like a shop sim or life sim at all. It has some familiar elements of both: collecting or growing ingredients, managing inventory, buying new cooking stations, and selling some of my creations from Flora's shop.
But for all that, it's really not a sim and is better approached as a story-forward adventure that also features cooking and platforming. There's some sort of plot brewing in Grat. The queen is often ill, assisted by local witches whose squabbles about a mysterious egg Flora finds herself in the middle of. The story's the point, not a backdrop as it might be in a game more about the shop management. And yet, cooking and exploring is the bulk of what I'm doing moment to moment so far, with dialogue playing a smaller role.
Cooking is pretty simple. I press X to interact with one of my cooking stations, choose a few ingredients from my menu, and hold X to craft, waiting for a small timed bar to fill until I can pick up what I've made. Occasionally there's a little timed button press minigame, the same as the one I use to forage ingredients around town. As for platforming, some bits do actually get a bit challenging (though there are accessibility settings to simplify it) with timed platforms and trick jumps.
Early on, the princess' bodyguard wants me to make her a snack: some kind of baked good, avoiding sweet flavors, and using only common ingredients. My 30 item inventory feels quite small given that five Braided Wheat and two Redroot counts as seven items, not two. The impact of ingredient flavors on the final dish flavor isn't clear and experimenting with combinations feels like a waste of my scraped-together stock. Instead, my goal is more to explore town hoping to spot a recipe in a store or snag one as loot from a little chest somewhere that will suit those constraints. It's more about solving the puzzle of each request using the right recipe and ingredients than playing around hoping to create something on my own.
Time of day plays a small role in Flora's goals. Some areas are best accessed at night when shimmering purple platforms appear to help me reach them while certain potions must be brewed by moonlight. But I don't have an energy meter or calendar or any other sense of time management to dictate each day.
Money is a resource I need to manage, and I can put meals up for sale in my shop window while I'm puttering about inside to earn more outside of quests. But I'm not really encouraged to make money or customize my shop for its own sake. It's always a means to fulfilling the next recipe request to advance the story. It took me a little longer than I care to admit to realize that experimenting with recipes or exploring weren't really going to be intrinsically rewarding and that I needed to stay focused on which of my meal requests I could deliver next.
Now that I've wrapped my head around it, what I want from Magical Delicacy is a little stronger feedback loop between all its activities. I wish that fulfilling a quest would naturally lead me to unlock a new area of town where I find a new type of ingredient that's the answer to a different recipe puzzle which rewards me with a new cooking station that unlocks new recipes and so on. That happens occasionally, but I often find myself stuck at a loose end, unsure which of my quests are currently dead ends and which are the way forward. I got multiple quests quite early on, for instance, that required the use of a cauldron, several hours before I was even given a quest that I suspected might reward that new tool.
That missed step feeling has kept me from having the drive to pick it up night after night the way other cozy sim-adjacent games can inspire. As a dish, Magical Delicacy has a lot of flavor but hasn't filled me up. "Style over substance," if I were to put it in Paul Hollywood parlance. But I do really like the style.
