Review – Lost Recipes –

This is a bite-sized game that’s easy to play, and fun. The graphics are beautiful and the concept of making your own recipe book with different recipes every time you start is unique enough to keep people coming back for more.

Lost Recipes is an interesting and ambitious puzzle game that tries to bring the story of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland into a gameplay format. The mechanics are strong, but it unfortunately falls short with its narrative choices.

Lost Recipes is a game that has been released on the Google Play Store. The game is designed to be a recipe website, where players can search for recipes and then cook them in the game.

Schell Games is the kind of developer that, regardless of genre, makes you want to see what they come up with. Thanks to games like their I Expect You Die trilogy, they’ve established themselves as one of the most prominent VR developers in the market. That’s perhaps why I was so excited to try out their fresh new game, Lost Recipes. Cooking games aren’t exactly my bread and butter (there’s a pun there somewhere), but I had faith that they’d find a way to make them more engaging. And I was absolutely correct.

These skewer parts didn’t appeal to me, mostly because of the motion controls.

In Lost Recipes, you play as a kind of ghost cook. It’s never explicitly stated whether you’re dead or a psychic, but let’s face it, that’s not the point of the game. Are you playing a culinary simulator for the sake of the plot? In any case, you’ve come to meet several old spirits who want to teach you recipes from their separate civilizations. Learn the recipes, make them, and present them to the spirits, who will reward you with a star system. That’s all there is to it: study a few old civilizations’ recipes. Surprisingly, I believe you will be able to make them in real life, since none of the items used in these recipes are very difficult to come by.

What about honey with wine? What the hell is going on?

The following is the basic gameplay loop: First and foremost, choose a meal. You’ll be whisked away to a Chinese, Greek, or Mayan kitchen, where you’ll be met by a ghost who will explain you about the cuisine as well as its cultural significance. Simply follow the directions marked in a floating cookbook from there. Prepare some onions, bake some bread, grill some freshly cut pork pieces, make some wine, brew some oolong tea, and so on. These cultural discourses were never patronizing or monotonous. The voice acting is fantastic, with each ghost perhaps being portrayed by a local or someone with a strong foreign accent.

The controls themselves are… satisfactory. This isn’t the nicest example of motion controls in an Oculus Quest game I’ve seen (and I’ve only had the headset for a month), but it might have been worse. Even though the physics are a little shaky at times, it’s much more responsive than other PSVR games. I’ve never been confident in my ability to chop pork correctly or control a skewer on top of a barbecue. However, it wasn’t a full deal-breaker. The game’s handling of mobility, on the other hand, irritated me. You must constantly wander about the kitchen, and the only way to accomplish it is by teleporting. I despised the fact that I couldn’t freely roam about the kitchen. Why did you provide us seamless camera controls but not the freedom to roam about the kitchen?

My Mediterranean ancestors almost compelled me to use all of the olive oil in the bowl. It’s just how we do things around here.

It’s a simplistic presentation, but it’s not terrible. Lost Recipes isn’t the first virtual reality culinary game, but it’s far from the worst. Most of these cookery games have incredibly bad low-poly visuals that didn’t even manage to make food appear like food. This isn’t the situation here. Sure, the game is still low-poly, but given that some of the meals genuinely made me hungry, I can only presume the presentation was on point, right?

The game’s major weakness, on the other hand, is its briefness. I enjoyed the idea and the entire gameplay loop, however Lost Recipes only has nine meals in total, three from each of the game’s three cultures. That is dissatisfying. The game may be completed in under an hour. Sure, when you’ve completed all of the dishes, you can go back and attempt to achieve five stars in each one, but that’s pretty much it. Even by VR standards, when you’re not supposed to be able to play a game for more than a few minutes, Lost Recipes was much too brief. I finished it all in one sitting. I was left wanting more after finishing the game.

Those ghosts, on the other hand, were a LOT more forgiving than Gordon Ramsay.

Lost Recipes exemplifies one of virtual reality’s most compelling features. If this had been a console game, I would have despised it. The extra novelty of cleaning my own dishes with reasonable motion controls while learning about ancient history made this game much more enjoyable than I could have expected. Regrettably, it’s incredibly brief. I wish I could have spent more time in the kitchen preparing meals from other old civilizations. I’m hoping Schell Games can make amends in the future with a DLC pack or a sequel. Either way, I’m looking forward to it.

Oculus Quest 2’s Lost Recipes is now available.

Oculus Quest 2 was reviewed.

The publisher gave me with a copy of Lost Recipes.

As an example:

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Look at them!

Related Tags

• fun meals to make
• blank recipe book
• follow me for more recipes