But she’ll attack you while you attempt to make it, which is tedious and aggravating. If you get three infractions, Happy shows up and attacks you unless you’re able to make her a rotten sandwich without dying. Every time you fail to complete an order within the time limit, an infraction is added. You have a health bar and, if it empties, you die and have to start the shift over again.
Exploding enemies can destroy finished burgers, too. You’ll also end up messing up orders because the appliances will turn off while you’re busy, costing you precious seconds where the food isn’t cooking. And that also means getting an infraction! Yay! Mistakes will inevitably lead to you having to sometimes throw out burnt patties and start over. Happy’s Humble Burger Farm has nothing to let you know how long it takes for the patties to cook, so you’ll have to watch for when the texture changes. There are three different kinds of patties to cook, two fryables, two types of drinks, cookies, and pies to keep in mind. You have to go and look at the register to see them. Speaking of awful, there are no UI tips telling you about the orders. Also awful is that it can be hard to tell if patties are even done, as the textures don’t make it particularly clear at times. It’s eerie and tense, sure, but awful from a gameplay perspective. Some will sneak up on you and hit you in the back while you’re cooking. There are also enemies that explode or obstruct your vision. Appliances and the kitchen lights will both turn off randomly while you’re cooking, and you’ll need to stop what you’re doing and go hit the switches to turn them back on. The game doesn’t tell you this until you go to start prepping. You can’t prep much before your shift starts, as you have to start said shift before you can turn the appliances on. Customers enter, and you’ll take on an order one at a time, in which you have two minutes to complete. You have to clock in and then run to the entrance to turn the sign on to start your shift. Happy’s restaurant is jampacked with illogical annoyances meant to make your time spent more tedious. The game barely explains most of its mechanics. To be blunt, it’s the worst of its sort in that regard. You’ve probably played a game similar to Happy’s Humble Burger Farm‘s cooking gameplay before, whether it be Cook, Serve, Delicious or Diner Bros. Unsurprisingly, most of your time will be spent at the restaurant. There are couple of buildings other than your apartment that can be entered as well, such as a shop that lets you steal things from it and sell them back to it, and a coffee shop. You can freely explore the area at your leisure, as Happy’s Humble Burger Farm isn’t in real time.
Cassette tapes detailing lore, tokens that you can use to improve the restaurant, and optional boss battles. There’s an area between the two with all sorts of things to find. If you mess up at your job, Happy will murder you.īefore work, you need to actually walk from your apartment to the restaurant. But Happy, the cow depicted in all the advertising surrounding the chain, is a living being. You’re meant to go to work at the restaurant. Also, much of the world around you may not be real. Before you know it, you wake up in a crummy apartment and you’ve been hired by the titular fast food restaurant. The two surgeons discuss the operation, but then pivot to a more important topic: lunch. The game begins with your character on an operating table as a mind-control device is placed in your head. Granted, the game will very likely completely pivot away from those at some point and become something much more experimental and strange, so the cooking might not even matter.
As such, these impressions are based on the first few hours of the game and focus on the cooking aspects. As far as I know, it didn’t unlock again for me until the day I wrote this. A week or so before launch, the playtest ended and the game became a single bit on my SSD.
#COOK SERVE DELICIOUS 2 PLUS#
I figured the playtest was obviously not the final build of the game, plus I didn’t want to lose another save file, so I waited. During the review period, the game pivoted to a playtest and my save was deleted. The game is absolutely not for everyone, but the question stands: is Happy’s Humble Burger Farm worth it?īefore jumping in further, I want to explain why this is an impressions piece and not a review. However, many of its gameplay choices can make playing it a chore for anyone who actually wants to take the cooking sections seriously. The world itself is compelling and, yes, it can be fairly freaky at times. It’s a combination restaurant cooking and horror game with a lo-fi aesthetic and a lot of unique, bizarre choices.
#COOK SERVE DELICIOUS 2 FREE#
It’s a sequel to a free hour-long experiment and, best I can tell, the gameplay is bad on purpose. Happy’s Humble Burger Farm is a hard game to critically evaluate.