Arcane Eats Aims to Offer Its Own Flavor of Roguelike Deckbuilding

By Elijah Gonzalez | November 13, 2025 | 10:35am

Video Games Features Arcane Eats

Arcane Eats Aims to Offer Its Own Flavor of Roguelike Deckbuilding

With Slay the Spire 2 poised to suck many of us back into a blackhole of intensive combos and tense monster-slaying this March, other roguelike deckbuilders will likely have a bit of an uphill battle in the coming months. That said, there’s still room for more than one title in this uber-popular format, and that’s doubly true if they distinguish themselves from Mega Crit’s genre-defining title.

Case in point, while Arcane Eats has a solid amount of overlap with this genre heavyweight, it serves up its own twist on the space in the form of culinary chaos. Having sunk a little over an hour into its demo on Steam, its cooking theme is more than just an aesthetic choice. Several of its central mechanics are tailored around the push and pull of the kitchen as you attempt to win the greatest battle of all: dealing with aggressively annoying customers.

Set in a high-fantasy village called Savory Springs, you play as a restaurant owner aiming to make a name for themself as they battle waves of diners and food judges alike. Alongside your co-chef, you’ll make your way through a month of high-octane cooking in an attempt to unlock the secrets of the “culinary leylines.”

On the surface, you’d be forgiven for assuming that the main thing that differentiates Arcane Eats is its foodie framing. Here, you assemble a deck of cards that represent ingredients, cookware, and seasonings, as you combine these to create meals for guests. Your patrons have a hunger meter (which acts like their health bar) that fills as you feed them. However, if you take too long, they’ll start hurling complaints your way, which chip away at your mental health (your health bar). If this meter fully deteriorates, it’s game over. While the context is different, it’s a bit like battling through waves of monsters in any number of roguelike deckbuilders.

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However, there is a crucial difference: the act of cooking these meals. When you play a food card, you need to physically place it on one of the three skillets in front of you. Each card has an icon representing its Cook Time, which indicates how many turns it will take until the dish is ready. As you add ingredients to a skillet, it increases the Food value of the course, which influences how much it will impact a patron’s hunger meter. Ingredients change other attributes too, like what food groups are involved, its flavoring, and more.

This cuisine element gives the experience a unique feel compared to other games in this style, because, much like a line cook battling to stay ahead of incoming orders, each day at the restaurant becomes an exercise in trying to keep up with customer demands. You can get a head start by preparing meals in advance (these patrons usually aren’t particularly picky), but on the flip side, you can easily find yourself overwhelmed by a full house as customers pile out the door.

Additionally, different patron types have specific actions that become more damaging the longer they are left alone. As previously mentioned, they can complain, which deals damage to your mental health, but they can also do things like swipe the top ingredient off a skillet in front of them, hit you with debuffs that clog your deck with bad cards, and more. Because of this, there’s an interesting mixture of planning and reacting, as you attempt to shore up meals while also shifting gears to feeding customers who are going to hit you with statuses you’re not prepared to deal with.

Beyond this relatively unique element of the experience, the game’s deckbuilding also features all the expected fixins. When the shop is closed, you can spend the gold you earned from customers to buy new cards, which can then be used to build up combos: for instance, you can build a deck around spicy food that stacks status effects, make the most of “burning” cards to thin out your deck, and more. Some cards will take an impressive chunk out of a customer’s hunger at the cost of taking longer to prepare, while others may use up more of the energy used to assemble a meal during a turn. You’ll also have opportunities to trash or modify what’s in your deck, and encounter events that offer upgrade choices. Adding to these variables, you’ll choose between factions and chefs to recruit at the beginning of each run, which come with their own passives and starting cards.

What I’ve seen of the game’s deckbuilding seems to work as intended, giving you a good amount of room to customize and make decisions regarding what you want to specialize in. At the same time, though, this is admittedly where the gameplay is most similar to its peers, which could be a boon or a drawback depending on how burnt out you are on more standard entries in the genre. While the cooking element of the game sets it apart in terms of both its mechanics and its visual framing, as its cartoonish high-fantasy backdrop of hungry goblins and Guy Fieri-looking fairies with frosted tips grants it a light-hearted vibe, the core of what’s here could very well prove an overly familiar dish with time.

That said, my hour or so with the game has piqued my interest. While the act of assembling your food-based deck is nothing new, managing your cooking space while whipping up entrees freshens up the moment-to-moment particulars of the experience. My time with the demo crescendoed in a tense boss fight with the previously mentioned Guy Fie-ary, as his aversion to anything without a garnish led to a lot of complicated plate spinning that proved quite compelling. What I’ve played of Arcane Eats might have just been a taste test, but it has piqued my interest in the full course.

Elijah Gonzalez is an associate editor for Endless Mode. In addition to playing the latest, he also loves anime, movies, and dreaming of the day he finally gets through all the Like a Dragon games. You can follow him on Bluesky @elijahgonzalez.bsky.social.