The quaint presentation hides food rich in wacky hijinks.
We were provided a copy of this game by Daedalic Entertainment for review purposes. This has not influenced the honesty and impartiality of this article
Suavest DAVE, EDITOR IN CHIEF and NINJA APPRECIATOR
You ever played Overcooked? That one game that lets you and your friends experience all the joys of buckling under the demands of the service industry without any of the pay? Daedilic’s Godlike Burger gives you the character-building suffering, but also the sweet catharsis of turning your ungrateful clientele into mincemeat. Everybody wins!
Godlike Burger tells the rags-to-riches tale of an aimless man, going from job to job until he settles on being a cook. He attempts to emulate and share the joy he experienced eating his gran’s burgers in his youth. He sucks at that, too. One thing leads to another, and he angers a telekinetic deity with his poor excuse for patties. He is bodied along with the rest of the restaurant and survives on the condition that he uses all the murderous means at his disposal to create the ultimate burger.
The Ingredients
The gameplay loop involves cooking and managing your restaurant, “Good Burger”. Orders come through at the top of the screen, and you’ve got to prepare them by extracting and preparing the relevant ingredients and giving the meal to the correct customer. Again, if you played Overcooked, you’ll be in very familiar territory here.
Difficulty arises in various forms. For starters, you can only handle one ingredient at a time until they have coalesced into a burger. The chef’s lack of manual dexterity means you’ll be going back and forth and are constantly at risk of wasting food when it gets busy, especially early on, when all your appliances are at risk of breaking down.
That brings us into the next bit: you’ve got to manage your resources. Before each day, you’re presented with the opportunity to fill your stock. You’ll have to consider the preferences of different species, as well as the type of meat that species can offer (you won’t deign to use any ingredients that aren’t sourced from cadavers)
The Method to the Madness
Then there’s the actual murder. You’ll have to murder people on the job discreetly so you don’t scare away the customers and/or get arrested. You have to clean their viscera off of you in the washroom, reset traps, chase down and dispose of any witnesses and hope you have the right methods to kill particular species (e.g. some are immune to the standard knife, for example. Poisoned sauce might be the way to go.)
In addition to profiling alien races for their preferences, behaviours, and weaknesses (there are a few layers of fucked up in this diabolical burger), you also have to consider “prestige”. This measures your success and access to corners of the universe you haven’t terrorised yet. This is all while orders are piling up.
You’re also met with additional problems that might obstruct the operations of your legitimate business. Occurrences like protesting, hidden food critics, and police activity (to name a few) make you think on your feet. If you fail to make a profit, you can expect a visit from the debt collectors. No two days are the same at Good Burger, and that’s certainly one of Godlike Burger’s strengths.
A murderous chef is only as good as his dullest knife
There’s a lot to juggle, but there are plenty of features to help you keep a cool head. You can either slow down or increase the passage of time, choose the music, or just focus on acquiring certain ingredients that day.
The game would benefit from a multiplayer mode. Overcooked is at its best/most stressful when you navigate the chaos with someone else. Delegating protein procurement to a staff member would make for a fun change of pace and engaging water-cooler talk. You could even have an option to blame all the funny business on your friend and have them deal with the consequences, as you maintain the general operations.
Characters don’t have the visual appeal of other cooking management games. While this makes it easier to watch the colour drain from their eyes, it doesn’t exactly inspire me to wow them with my cuisine. The comics and writing do a lot of the heavy lifting to keep you motivated.
Still, if you want to deal with all the minutiae of being a chef, restaurant manager, and murderer, I can’t think of anything else that’s so explicit about it. That Cooking Mama lady still seems to be on the straight and narrow. So, bon appetit!
If you liked: Overcooked, The Menu, The Bear, Sweeney Todd
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He/Him
A flamboyant ultra nerd, Dave participates in the Underlevelled Tournament both for the thrill of the fight, and to avenge the orphans lost in the climax of the previous tournament.
Born: London
Height: ???
Weight: ???
Nen Type: Manipulator
Classes: Editor, Dancer,
Hobbies: street dance, collecting manga volumes, reading, editing
Likes: short-to-medium walks on the beach, pointing out how things can and will be misconstrued as racism, fighting games, RPGs, anime, Hades, alternative hip hop, conscious hip hop, Mara Wilson, overly long bios, ice-cream
Dislikes: insincere media, his own uncanny resemblance to Richard Ayoade, mayonnaise
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