Magical Delicacy PC review – A middling dish

I’d been eagerly anticipating Magical Delicacy for quite some time now. I love Metroidvanias and cooking games, so a mix of the two really piqued my interest. The game does assuredly combine both of these and deliver them in a package built out of lovely pixel art and a good amount of content. But both halves don’t do much to really deliver on their individual strengths and the sum of their parts isn’t much to get excited about either. There’s plenty to do and see, though, for anyone that finds themselves intrigued by the premise.

Magical Delicacy is a crafting game that happens to have a decent-sized hub that you’ll get further in by using abilities. You need to progress in the story to get these, which is necessary for making it further in the world. This, in turn, will let you accrue additional ingredients and access more shops. These aspects synergise decently and make for an acceptable hook. All the while you’ll obtain currency to buy more ingredients and upgrade the shop where all the crafting takes place.

Annoyances start to creep in fairly early. After a brief tutorial, you’re thrown into the deep end. Multiple necessary mechanics aren’t explained and you just have to experiment (and probably waste precious ingredients in the process) to try and ascertain what it is exactly you’re meant to do to move forward. Simply put, I often found this aggravating. For instance, at one point in the game you get orders for items that require a roasted ingredient. I figured I’d roast a single item and include it in the dish, but the oven tells you that you need at least two ingredients to use it. So I assumed any roastable ingredients would become roasted when cooked as part of a dish.

I did this only to find that I couldn’t deliver the item as nothing was roasted. After messing with it some more, I discovered that individual items can be roasted. Figuring out almost all of the intricacies of the cooking system is like this. Why some additional info in the guide menu couldn’t be included is beyond me, but it makes Magical Delicacy far more annoying than it needed to be. And there are other similar issues related to the cooking. All food preparation has a timer, even something as instantaneous as chopping or grinding, although you can obtain an upgrade that shortens these later on.

Navigating the menus to prepare things is incredibly tedious and cumbersome as well. The UI just isn’t all that great. The dev should have looked to the Atelier series to see how to make the crafting more enjoyable, instead everything is so slow, confusing, and clunky that it’s quite difficult to have much fun while preparing food. Keeping all the NPCs straight while trying to deliver their requests is also problematic. You can put items unneeded for orders up for sale in your shop, but this requires you to actually stay at the shop and wait for NPCs to potentially purchase them. Almost every layer involved in the cooking side is just such a chore. It’s simply too common to get an order and have zero idea how to complete it.

The exploration and platforming fare betterish, but the world is somewhat confusingly laid-out and the platforming doesn’t really feel all that great. You can’t reach some areas at all unless you venture toward them at nighttime, as there are necessary platforms that require moonlight to stand on. I didn’t see the game explain this and you can’t switch to night, so realising that you have to wait for night to fall just to make it to the next leg of your journey or brew a potion is never fun. You can find feathers and trinkets while exploring the world. Feathers let you buy new recipes, trinkets net you certain upgrades.

Some of these are locked behind some fairly demanding platforming challenges that require you to use the main character’s abilities. These abilities can be fairly novel, such as using the power of mist to jump extra high or riding a broom over a large gap. But the platforming just isn’t too impressive on its own. Granted, exploration can be satisfying, so this part of Magical Delicacy isn’t exactly without merit. However, between the movement not feeling all that great and some questionable design, I wasn’t exactly champing at the bit to keep looking around. That and so much of the exploration is frequently railroaded by the story, so the game has a very stop-start rhythm to it.

In the end, Magical Delicacy isn’t outright bad at anything it does, but both the crafting and exploration are underwhelming compared to other games. I enjoyed looking at it and did have some fun here and there, but much of my time spent with the game had me dreading what came next instead of looking forward to it. As such, I can’t help but feel that a terrific concept has been squandered, even if the results are closer to middling than subpar.

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