‘Overcooked 2’: A Tale of Friendship and Interdependence
My first job was dishwashing in a pretentious restaurant that prided itself on its kitchen being run by a victor from the television show “Top Chef.” This was my introduction to both the restaurant industry and the workforce. In this environment, I was the lowest in the dominance hierarchy: the dishwasher. But luckily, the chefs noticed my attitude, work ethic, and sense of humor. They decided that this seventeen-year-old kid was worth promoting to prep cook and eventually pantry chef.
I worked in the restaurant industry until I went off to study abroad in China during college. When I came back to America months later, I solidified my conviction that I never wanted to work in a restaurant, in any capacity, ever again. Working in a restaurant reveals to you the dark, seedy underbelly of the otherwise luxurious dining experience we tend to expect when going out for a meal.
As consumers, we don’t tend to imagine the reality of improperly washed dishes, or unsanitary food preparation, or unwashed cutting boards, or things that drop on the floor, only to be added to the contents of our meal. Occasionally, we make the joke that the cooks will “spit in our food” if we are rude customers. But overall, its psychologically healthier to ignore these morbid considerations. I, however, can never forget them – which is why I find it so incredibly uncanny (and unlikely) that I have been playing and loving the restaurant-based game, Overcooked 2.
I started playing Overcooked 2 recently with some of my fellow Epilogue streamers on Twitch. It isn’t a game that I would have sought out, for aforementioned reasons. But our group of friends has made a habit of seeking out co-op and multiplayer games for streaming on the weekends. We began playing Don’t Starve Together, a game about survival, the gathering of resources, and fending off deadly monsters. Then for whatever reason we moved away to playing Left 4 Dead and its sequel, games about a team of survivors slaughtering waves and hordes of vicious zombies. This brought us to Overcooked 2, a fundamentally cooperative game about overcoming increasingly ridiculous obstacles to complete specific orders from your restaurant’s customers.
One of the shocking things about Overcooked 2 is how such a mundane premise can build into such complexity. The game starts you off with relatively straightforward orders, things like chopping ingredients and adding them to a simple dish, and then expediting the order out to the customer before they grow impatient. Then the game slowly ratchets up the difficulty and complexity. Orders start to become variable, where you have to pay close attention to modifications to the order – things like different meats or vegetables, things like rice or no rice, etc. Eventually, you are working on multiple orders at once, at different places in the kitchen, all while trying to coordinate with your teammates (other kitchen workers) which ingredients you need for which order. It all rapidly becomes hectic.
The entirety of Overcooked 2 takes place in a kitchen – a place I swore I would never find myself in again. This kitchen changes from level to level. In the game’s beginning, the kitchen is laid out as an open floor, with different functions located in the various corners of the level. You have a cutting board, plates, a stove top, and a place to deliver out food to customers. The game breaks this simple layout apart. Over the course of the game’s many levels, you become increasingly reliant on specialization; rice cookers and steamers are introduced, dishwashing becomes a priority, running plates and ingredients across the kitchen becomes hazardous, etc.
As the kitchen becomes a kind of enemy, antagonist, or difficulty setting for your team, communication becomes the priority for all the cooks in the kitchen. Whereas the game’s opening levels allowed some room for error, you will be unable to advance without direct cooperation and communication between everyone in the kitchen. Someone has to chop vegetables to order, someone has to wash dishes, someone has to cook meats, someone has to plate the cooked ingredients, etc. Thus, in my experience, much of our playthrough consisted not in the gameplay itself, but in the strategy before and after levels. Achieving the game’s coveted three star rating for a level is all but impossible if your team is not explicitly clear on who is responsible for what task in the kitchen.
By the game’s end, you and your teammates will have overcome impressive challenges, including kitchen platforms that move back and forth over deadly crevasses, kitchen rafts that require ingredients to be thrown across a gulf of water in between rafts, and eventually kitchen platforms that must manually be controlled by one of the cooks. The game builds upon one of the simplest and most mundane premises imaginable: cooks cooperating in a kitchen. Somehow, the developers of Overcooked 2 have built a game that’s fundamental mechanic is player cooperation.
Player cooperation is nothing new and arguably nothing special. I’ve written at length about the successful release of A Way Out in 2018, and we are all familiar with how successful multiplayer games have become (e.g. Fortnite). But so many instances of co-op feel like a bonus round to the main game, not the main game itself. Worse, many co-op features functionally appear as afterthoughts from the developer. Overcooked 2 feels like a team of indie developers sat down at a dinner meeting and, while enjoying their meal, decided to design a game around the very idea of cooperation: what kind of game mechanics will encourage, if not force, explicit cooperation between characters?
Overcooked 2 is a polished example of the positive potential inherent in video games as a medium. Above all, Overcooked 2 is a pro-social game. It encourages effective communication – one of the most important skills for employability – and interdependence – often written off as a soft skill that isn’t easily quantifiable in the way a GPA is. Overcooked 2 teaches us the necessity of clarity in relationships, of transparency in one’s intentions, and of perseverance towards a goal. I am often exhausted when I put down the controller after playing Overcooked 2, but I view that exhaustion as one of the game’s merits, like the feeling you have after “leg day” in the gym.
Overcooked 2 isn’t a game that you seek out for the graphics, or play for the story; although the story is absolutely bonkers and the graphics are adorable. Nor does Overcooked 2 demand a particular degree of skill from its players. Rather, the skill needed decreases in proportion to the degree of cooperation exhibited by your team.
I didn’t seek Overcooked 2 out, and I expected it to be stressful. (It is.) I expected the game to bring back horrible memories from working in kitchens over the course of my late teens, early twenties. (It didn’t.) I also didn’t realize the potential within the idea of cooperation. I have been playing multiplayer and cooperative games with these same friends for several months, and yet Overcooked 2 is the first game we’ve played where we literally take breaks just to talk about how to approach a level for either the first or hundredth time.
Overcooked 2 is a must-play for anyone who has a group of friends who also enjoy video games. Whether local multiplayer or online like I do, the game promises immense (and often hilarious) challenges. We love our friends and want to grow stronger bonds with people we care about, and Overcooked 2 offers us the chance to do just that: to bring our relationships from a simmer to a boil.
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