SEDAP! A Culinary Adventure on PC
When you think of Asia, and particularly Southeast Asia, it’s diverse culture that stands out. For a region that is not exactly huge relative to the world, it is home to so many different and interesting societies. And with that melting pot comes a diverse range of cuisines, and delicious food is always something we can all get behind. With kopiforge‘s SEDAP! A Culinary Adventure, you can add in a healthy helping of chaos that equates to co-op fun.
Much like the likes of Overcooked and other co-op games that demand coordination and testing the integrity of relationships, just watching the game is enough to help you understand what needs to be done. Of course, the problem is actually doing that without getting too flustered at taking the wrong step or getting frustrated at your partner for not contributing.
SEDAP! A Culinary Adventure casts players in the roles of cook and hunter, brought to life by the pair of cheeky culinary mavericks that are Som the Cooker and Gon the Hunter. Rather than have players fumbling over who to do what, it is clear that there is a distinction here for the adventure to work smoothly together with the helpful Merapi and the arcane knowledge of the Makanomicon.
Som is best kept preparing ingredients and doing the actual cooking, whereas Gon is who you’ll turn to if you need to hunt down animals and take care of any threats during your time on the dangerous Khaya Island. This translates not just to a stylistic and narrative choice, but also tangibly in how fast you can do certain things. It is the key differentiator to its contemporaries, where you know how your role works in creating a harmonious run, with tight and simple controls making it easy. How well you do that role, however, is why the madness happens.
Learning to cook means using the right ingredients, and these can be found all over each level with various obstacles standing in the way. It could be an ancient gate that requires one player to stand on the switch while the other ventures forward.
You could easily gather tea leaves by rotating the analog stick or suddenly find yourself fighting a living, breathing chilli plant in your bid to make the best kangkong. The healthy variety of methods in which fresh materials can be gathered is always something to look forward to.
Once you have the right ingredients, you must prepare them correctly for a dish to come together in SEDAP! A Culinary Adventure. That means completing various quick-time events and a little waiting time for the final, magical product. While the kitchen gets busy, it’s not as if things come to a standstill.
The incoming orders can easily create a choke, so the cycle continues with more gathering and fending off the beasts that make their way into the kitchen. Rush Hour sequences on certain levels also serve as a timely assessment of your progress, which is always welcomed.
As the pair and their food truck barrel through levels, recipes get increasingly more complex, and the number of ingredients and cooking methods increases. Naturally, players will get better at what they do, but you are never too comfortable with the pacing just about right. Those knives best stay sharp, and the wok hot if you want to achieve that perfect 3-star rating every time.
Your skills will be prominently displayed during various boss levels, where the pace gets pushed up with even more things to look after. An early challenge involves preparing dishes, collecting a specific resource while enemies spawn, and protecting a central object from harm. It is frenetic, it is chaotic, but it is undeniably entertaining.
Between levels, there is also a hub area where you can learn more about the food you are making, talk to a vendor and get more powerful tools with unique and innovative abilities to enhance your efficiency, and change up your loadout to prepare for a level. Being able to charge up and unleash an area-of-effect ability to have everything cooking be done instantly is a game-changer.
Such a well put-together experience is not contingent on you having a local or online partner to dive into SEDAP! A Culinary Adventure, the solo mode works quite brilliantly as well. Instead of needing to control two characters, you can switch at any time between the two while carrying out tasks.
In fact, the game is smart enough to do the switching for you, letting Gon take the reins when hunting animals and Som to get working in the kitchen. There is a trade-off here, as things like the teleporting totems are not as useful, and locked gates just require a simple activation to stay open forever. It makes the game much easier without the need for all that coordination, which takes away from the inherent pandemonium that is a prerequisite for the genre.
And while the gameplay loop is solid, the added cultural flavour and flair is excellent in endearing SEDAP! to the Southeast Asian crowd. The language within the game, the local dishes that get their time in the spotlight, the visuals, and even the music come together quite brilliantly for a feast for the eyes, ears, soul, and frankly, the stomach.
That said, with this being kopiforge’s first offering, there are still some hiccups here and there. Some of the cooking QTEs can be hard to figure out at first. For many who fail at that juncture, that would require restarting the level to maintain that perfect record. That frustration can easily colour your perception of the game during extended play.
During co-op play, players will have to split up and move towards different parts of a level, and the way the camera splits with a rotating separator can be hit or miss. It was straightforward enough for a more seasoned player, but for a newcomer, the changing view can be disorientating. The game does have the option to have a permanent split-screen, but it is a little too tight for comfort and reduces the visibility a little too much.
There are no separate save files either, at least from my time with the game, so if you are jumping in solo after going through the ringer with a co-op partner, you have to start all over again. It applies the other way around, too, so it’s something to look out for if you are taking a break before returning.
As an experience, SEDAP! A Culinary Adventure has the makings to climb the summit of co-op games. Its distinct focus, coupled with the gameplay loop, aesthetics, and systems that are more welcoming of players of all skill levels. The brand of delectable chaos is best enjoyed with a partner, but even if you have to go it alone, the kitchen is still hot enough to ignite the culinary passion, and that’s always a good thing.
SEDAP! A Culinary Adventure is now available on PC.
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Summary
SEDAP! A Culinary Adventure provides a distinct Southeast Asian flavour of co-op madness, with the main course best enjoyed with a partner willing to get down.
