I really love games with interesting crafting systems. There’s something satisfying about creating something when so much of gaming is focused on destruction, where a cooking system with tons of moving parts can have a similar level of appeal to a fine tuned combat system. Because of that interest, I was especially intrigued by Magical Delicacy, a new game that marries Metroidvania exploration with cooking-based gameplay, all with a beautiful witchy package.
In Magical Delicacy you play as Flora, a young witch who comes to a town called Grat to improve her magic. You immediately get a kitchen as a home base (which comes with some tools but is also upgradable) and both fulfill orders for the locals around town while uncovering more of the story and more of the map. This leads to two key gameplay types – exploring the town using platforming and skills you unlock and the crafting gameplay while you’re in your kitchen.
While I enjoyed unlocking additional areas around the town and finding new things was intriguing, the crafting gameplay was far more engaging to the point where I found myself frustrated if anything was gated by platforming skill. The platforming isn’t bad, but it doesn’t feel particularly good, and there’s a decent amount of backtracking throughout which exacerbates the frustration. As you progress, a few different methods of fast travel are unlocked, but they don’t cover everything, so I found myself doing the same sections of platforming over and over to the point where it just got annoying.
There are a lot of little pieces of frustration that unfortunately make Magical Delicacy a hard one to get into. Ingredients are another little piece, some of which are only able to be harvested on the map, which require backtracking and either remembering where they are, marking them on your map once you find them (which is another unlockable item) or looking things up with a guide. You have a small garden, which is helpful, but I wish there was a little bit more support when getting specific ingredients is so vital.
Getting ingredients and platforming is really the busy work to get to the crafting system, which is one of my favorite cooking systems I’ve seen in a game so far. Your kitchen has a number of stations (and you can buy others to make more recipes) which can either prepare an item (such as a mortar and pestle for grinding items) or complete cooking an item. Each item has a type (vegetable, herb, etc.), a flavor profile (salty, sweet, floral, etc.) and a rarity, and all of these play a part in the requests you receive. A character might ask you for a food that’s not a soup that is savory and has a dried item. You have to come up with the right recipe and ingredients to fit all of these requests; once you get into things, it can be a fun puzzle that’s exciting to come up with. I do think the way this process is onboarded to you is a little shaky – a lot of requests come through early on that you have no way of fulfilling at that point, and getting the flavor profiles right can involve some trial and error until you can buy an item that predicts what something will taste like before you make it. That said, it’s a really fun system once you get some of those items that make your life easier.
One of the aspects I really enjoyed about Magical Delicacy was the setting. Grat is an interesting city to explore. The art is beautiful, but once you dig a bit deeper, little pieces of the world building stand out as being even more interesting. There are different factions and groups working for their own purpose, but Magical Delicacy still manages to feel cozy. The world is lived in, which makes coming up with orders for a new customer even more satisfying.
Magical Delicacy is a difficult game for me to write about. There are a lot of little points of frustration which at times made me want to stop playing, but then another piece of the world or another crafting puzzle would bring me back. These pain points are most easily felt early on in the game, which is a shame because I think it will stop a lot of people from playing before they can experience all the delights that Magical Delicacy has to offer. Perhaps this makes Magical Delicacy a particularly apt title – this game is a bit of an acquired taste, but there’s nothing quite like it.
