Cook, Serve, Delicious! 2!! (2017)

Don't let the pretentious "hardcore cooking sim" tag make you think they're just faking it: Cook, Serve, Delicious! 2!! is a hardcore game of keypresses in order to cook for your (and the other's) restaurants to climb up the ladder of fame.

What makes it hardcore? Its gameplay loop is simple: you start your journey with nothing - not even a restaurant - and so you must work with others in order to get enough game and money to then lead your own restaurant.

Every restaurant has its own plates and preparations, all of them remarking the theme of the restaurant (e.g. Poppers & Crunchies has fried stuff, Eaty's is your usual pub, Chilly Bowl is your creamery and so on so forth). The plates divide themselves in Holding Station pre-mades, on-the-go plates and bonus plates as well with drinks and beverages sprinkled in between.

Your restaurant is simple: you start your shift by cooking something for the Holding Stations (may it be a premade fried cannoli shell, pasta or anything else) so that you can use it at a later moment to fulfill an order. From there, customers will start piling in based on a little something called "buzz": every level will increase the 'attraction' based on old services you've done, making more customers pile in and become restless if not served immediately.

Every plate you will serve will have a bunch of keyboard presses associated with it by using letters of the ingredients or preparations you might need to do for it (such as: Olives - V or O, Anchovies - A or N, Plastic Foil - P, Wrap - W...) and at later levels the speed these commands will need to be done will increase, so if you're like me and have long nails or a keyboard that has been giving you pains as far as resisting your keycap presses, think twice before committing.

The game ramps up in difficulty as you go along and rack better scores, sometimes making it impossible to fulfill orders and requiring you to restart simply because you made your first Holding Station order wrong, causing the customers to not even wait the minimum time requires for the food to cook.

It has unfair steep slopes of difficulty and sometimes your own success is your own downfall, making it hard to fully enjoy the game at its Standard Shift difficulty and forcing you to fall back on Zen Difficulty which and, sadly, this mode doesn't grant you the same rewards as playing the game normally.

It's hard to say whether I like it or not. I do, but I have an extremely hateful relationship with the last levels of these two:

And while I don't mind the challenge, not being able to fulfill orders because Mango goes from keypress M to keypress A at a tab's distance during one plate makes me angry.

I feel like some levels are just giving you such short timers that you're supposed to remember every key press for every recipe by heart so that you can rush through the others.

Shame because sometimes the same ingredient in different recipes has a different key press, so you can't rely on memory alone but have to check exactly what you're doing beat by beat. And the customers seem to hate the fact that you're making them wait for anything.