Overcooked Is Exactly Like Working in a Kitchen, Even When It’s Not

As I once wrote in the forward of my cookbook, Fry Scores, I have lived many culinary lives. I’ve been an assistant baker. I’ve worked in meat cutting and seafood. I’ve been a server and a hostess. I’ve worked in the kitchen under the table at shady, family-owned restaurants. And I’ve been cooking for my family since I was a kid. In other words, I have a broad swath of experience in the food industry, knowledge that I’ve more or less left behind now that I work mostly as a writer. But it served me well in my teens and twenties and I look back on the experience fondly. I love to cook and be around food, whether serving, styling or making it.

That love for sharing and making food even plays out in my virtual life. I play a lot of cooking games, or games that feature cooking as part of the gameplay, from Battle Chef Brigade, which turns cooking into a match three puzzle game, to The Sims or The Elder Scrolls, where meals are a matter of growing or gathering the right ingredients and putting them together at a cooking station. For various reasons, few games can adequately mirror the experience of preparing a meal (Cooking Mama comes pretty close, in that it walks the player through the physical steps of prepping each ingredient, and includes factors like timing or technique). But while that series focuses on mimicking the steps of completing a recipe through food prep mini-games, a new game I’ve started playing, Overcooked, depicts another facet of the cooking process: the fancy kitchen footwork. Its objective is not to learn how to julienne a carrot or boil a pot of rice; rather, it illustrates the frenzy of pivoting around multiple people in tight quarters and using limited space and time as efficiently as possible. Players fetch and chop ingredients, cook and plate food, and send it out to the servers, all under an extreme time limit and with various obstacles, from moving countertops, tiny pathways, foot traffic, and constantly burning food. It’s painful, it’s frantic, it’s murder on the joints and psyche. It’s like being in an actual restaurant kitchen.

Now, I say that, but I’ll concede that Overcooked isn’t an exact replica of the real thing. It doesn’t depict the vast scope of menu items, ingredients, techniques, implements, and equipment in an actual commercial kitchen. You don’t actually cook “real” recipes or use identifiable quantities. Most restaurants don’t have pits of lava, conveyor belts, or sheets of ice to deal with, and in real life if a health inspector caught me chucking food on the floor, I’d probably get arrested. But in terms of coasting my brain into autopilot and letting my programming take over, it’s familiar, almost comforting. There’s a strategy in leveraging every last second to push out just one last dish. It’s a chaos I already know how to handle, maybe even enjoy.