Sometimes when a game is designed for a cosy and wholesome experience, you can go too far and over think things. This can be making something too simple, too easy, too repetitive or so fluffy it means the player doesn’t really feel engaged. Wholesome and cosy games can be involved and many of them are. Manitas Kitchen is an example where its a little too simple for its own good and your mileage for how much enjoyment you’ll get from this cooking game will depend on your tolerance for repetition.
Manitas Kitchen takes place in a single screen kitchen that never changes shape or design and in it sits Trexito, a short armed T-Rex wanting to make pizza. He takes on chef duties at the pizza shop and thus you are talked through the gameplay loop. Knead the dough with a button mash, spread some sauce with a timed button press, add ingredients with more timed button presses and then pop it in the pizza oven before serving. Each step involves a very slow, dawdling waddle between kitchen stations that was cute for the first three minutes before becoming intensely frustrating because Trexito is very, very slow to move. If you make mistakes or muck up orders by burning pizzas or adding the wrong ingredients Trexito gets stressed and if he gets too stressed, you’ll shut up shop and try again tomorrow. Don’t worry, there is no nervous breakdown game over dark path – the stakes are very low here.
Over the course of the single player story, more dinosaur friends will join to add support and they can help speed up the process with a special move that acts on a cool down. Through earning money with correct orders, you can level up the skills of these dinosaurs such as immediately kneading three pizza doughs or adding a tip bonus to a few pizzas. You can also unlock new ingredients in your pantry to create some more well themed pizzas too. The actual gameplay never changes though, as the minigame of pressing well timed buttons just shows a few different ingredient options. A simple pizza is no different to a more complicated one – it might just require two more button presses.
That is a huge problem when you have the exact same four mini games on repeat over and over and over and over again. Nothing changes except for night time shifts where you need to keep some torches alight to see what you are building. That mechanic gets old fast too because they extinguish mid-minigame and then you often fail for something that felt outside of your control. The stress meter is an interesting gameplay mechanic but in a funny twist of design, making Trexito stressed makes the game more playable as he moves faster in a panic! It feels like I shouldn’t be making him freak out to enjoy the game but here we are. With a threadbare story that takes place over several hours, this is an idea spread way too thinly with no let up to be enjoyable for the masses.
The final issue I had with Manitas Kitchen is the inherent fuzzy controls and lag. Trexito doesn’t like to line up with the pizza stations properly and the hit boxes for recognising he is in the right spot are not generous enough to make it easy to play. When coupled with his slow waddle, it just makes you audibly sigh with resignation. The ingredient minigame also has some horrific lag, to the point where its safer and easier to press the chop button about a second or two before you should just to make sure it works. It isn’t satisfying to play.
For all its cosy dino nature, playful artwork in the story panels and the fun theming, I was fuming with just how bored and frustrated I was with Manitas Kitchen. It just needed a little variety to spice it up and then the game would have been far more enjoyable to play through. It is one of the weaker cooking games out there and as a single player only experience, I’d recommend almost any other co-op kitchen game solo over this.
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