Super Chipflake Ü: Quest for the Uncooked Schnitzel PC review — Uncooked is right

Update: A year-old beta version of the game was uploaded to Steam instead of the final build, so this review doesn’t reflect the released game.

If I see a colourful 3D platformer, I play it, it’s as simple as that. Super Chipflake Ü: Quest for the Uncooked Schnitzel‘s cat protagonist and plethora of shiny collectibles to gather had me on board in an instant, but I wasn’t actually prepared for what this game is. To be clear, this is less of a collect-a-thon platformer and more of a thinly veiled series of confusing, nigh inscrutable fetch quests. Any children playing it will have little idea what to do and the same goes for many adults. It has a cute world and controls well enough, but I had a pretty poor time with this one across the board, even if I enjoyed the humour on display and found some of its central conceits novel enough.

Super Chipflake Ü: Quest for the Uncooked Schnitzel puts you in the shoes (paws?) of a cat named Chip. Chip wakes up one day deciding that he absolutely has to have some schnitzel (a German cut of fried meat for any unaware.) Unfortunately for Chip (and anyone who buys this game,) schnitzel can only be found in a nearby town, and wouldn’t you know it, they’re all out of ingredients. Chip’s mission is to do menial errands for everyone nearby until he gets the ingredients for the town’s lone cook and finally has lunch.

There are around a couple of dozen quest-giver NPCs situated in Super Chipflake Ü: Quest for the Uncooked Schnitzel‘s smallish open world that all have tasks for you to complete. These are usually of the “find an item and bring it to them” variety, which I found to be instantly disappointing. The basic gameplay mostly consists of you wandering around the world and looking for items to return to NPCs. Doing so will reward you with a sticker and occasionally an item. You then take your new sticker to show another NPC in town, who gives you coins. You could have just gotten coin rewards for the quests instead and skipped this step, but the game needed two sets of currency for some reason that’s beyond me.

You need coins to buy items from the game’s shop that give you some new functionality. Or you’re supposed to anyway. The first time I went to purchase an item, the game glitched and it gave me every usable item at once without making me pay for most of them. The game’s shiny collectibles are mainly used to upgrade various aspects of these items, and these were all mostly given to me without having to actually spend any of them, too. It’s not every day you get an instant glitch early on in a game that completely removes any and all progression, but this game apparently didn’t get enough playtesting.

Regardless, I’d still found the majority of Super Chipflake Ü: Quest for the Uncooked Schnitzel‘s shiny collectible currency within a couple of hours and now had nothing to spend any of it on. Brilliant. At least money was still used to purchase items here and there to be turned in for some fetch quests. Now, 3D platformers live and die on a simple question: Is the movement fun? The answer to that for this game is a resounding no. Chip can walk and jump. With items, he can use a hookshot and run super fast with speed shoes, but that’s all there is to it. Without the speed shoes, getting around feels slow. With them, things are incredibly quick, as if you’re playing as Sonic. Neither feels all that great.

What really sinks the game is the way it handles its quests, though. Whenever you meet a new NPC and get a quest, it’s added to your quest log. Super Chipflake Ü: Quest for the Uncooked Schnitzel has no map and absolutely nothing to orient you or help you remember where anything is. Saw an item or NPC earlier and just don’t recall where they are? Tough. Wander until you find them. Most of the quest descriptions are as brief as they are vague, so you’ll be trying to complete some without knowing what it is you’re looking for or where you’re supposed to be looking. It’s as boring and tedious as it sounds.

For instance, earlier in the game, I came across an NPC that offered me oil, one of the necessary schnitzel ingredients. I didn’t write this down, so I didn’t recall which NPC this was at the time. Case in point, you’re going to want to take extensive notes when playing this game due to it lacking the most basic quality-of-life features. This includes rebinding controls or, shockingly, the ability to quit the game from the program (you’ll need to manually shut it down.) The game simply expects you to remember just about everything off the top of your head. The game design just isn’t strong enough to ensure you’ll do this, unfortunately.

And even if you’re taking notes, you’ll be SOL if one of the items you need vanishes. One of the most unique aspects of Super Chipflake Ü: Quest for the Uncooked Schnitzel is that you don’t have an inventory, Chip literally carries everything you find by hand. I happened to be holding a unique item the first time I ventured underwater, not realizing I’d respawn shortly after, since Chip’s initial breath gauge is so small. When I respawned, my items were gone. The unique item didn’t seem to respawn, even though it was needed for a quest, so I couldn’t complete said quest. Oh well.

Items can be stacked up to 15 by the time your carrying capacity is maxed out, and there is a certain amount of charm to this. I can’t recall another game handling inventory this way, but that’s probably a good thing, as it simply doesn’t make much sense. Another aspect is that certain items can be merged with one another, such as mushrooms and springs that make a single-use bounce pad, or a stick and a stone being used to make a hammer. Speaking of which, one quest requires you to bring a hammer to Jenn, a character that doesn’t show up on the NPC list and whom I didn’t recall meeting. The solution to this, as with most things in this game, is to just walk around and talk to every NPC again. So much fun!

But one of the most baffling choices in the game has to do with the speed shoes. As they’re shoes, Chip obviously wears them on his feet. But they don’t work when he’s holding items with his hands. So you’ll go through the trouble to buy the shoes and upgrade them (unless the “you get everything for free” bug isn’t fixed later on,) only to not be able to use them while lugging your items across the map. Why include the shoes if we’re not allowed to use them? That’s a great question. It just feels like a middle finger aimed square at the player to pad out a game that’s already padded out by its lack of basic features.

Super Chipflake Ü: Quest for the Uncooked Schnitzel is an aggravating experience that would be a lot better with some QOL, bugfixes, and inclusion of basic PC game functionality. Instead, it’s a buggy, sometimes broken, and irritating series of fetch quests that mostly seem to want to pad itself out rather than be anything resembling fun. If you’re looking for a cute 3D platformer, this isn’t it. Only check this one out if memorising a mediocre open world with zero handholding while undergoing fetch quest after fetch quest sounds like a great time to you.

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