Preview: Cuisineer Seems Fun, but Somewhat Slow on Switch

Cuisineer already tasked us with fighting monsters for ingredients and running a restaurant on PCs back in 2023, and now it is poised to do so for Switch players. I had a chance to go through some early hours of the adventure on the system. It still seems as promising as ever. However, there are a few minor hitches that could keep shifts from running smoothly, but it’s early enough that those could be squashed before the dinner service.

Pom is a young woman who lives as an adventurer. However, an ominous letter from her parents sends her running back to her hometown. Turns out the situation isn’t dire! They just went on a cruise and wanted her to run the restaurant while they’re gone! Said cruise also put them in debt and stripped back what the cafe is capable of, however. This means Pom has to use her warrior skills to help bring it back to its former glory and keep the debt-collecting wolves from the door.

This means, for those new to Cuisineer, that it is a game with split gameplay. For part of it, Pom is managing a restaurant. That means getting ingredients and stations to create recipes for meals, finding crafting materials to build tables and expand the restaurant and stations, and running services daily to earn income. The other half of it feels a bit like a roguelike dungeon-crawler. You equip weapons, which are cooking implements, and take part in active, Hades-like runs into locations to defeat the monsters for the ingredients they drop. As you explore, you’ll also come across trees and mineral deposits for crafting materials. So an in-game day can be spent shopping and running the restaurant up until the lunch rush, then heading into a dungeon for the second half of the day to restock.

As we already know from the PC version of the game, it is a formula that works pretty well! The issue here in my early hours on the Switch is that the loading times really get in the way so far. Going from the restaurant to the town? That’s a loading screen that takes at least 10-15 seconds. Going from the town to the dungeon? It’ll be an even longer loading screen. Finish a floor in a dungeon and venturing to the next one? You’ll experience another long loading screen between them. A patch dropped between when I started playing and when I wrote this preview. While it did seem to help the loading times that take place in-town, the ones involving the dungeon are as long as ever. This ends up slowing down what should otherwise being a swift experience.

I also noticed a few things that might get tweaked a bit, or might not, once the full and final version of Cuisineer drops on the Switch. For example, escaping a dungeon via the warp pendant Pom receives almost immediately after starting the game involves a bit of waiting. You can’t immediately zip out. Also, it can be interrupted. That is a bit of a pain, but I feel it’s likely working as intended to force you to be smart about when you use it. I also wish the tutorial letters arrived in the inbox at a faster rate. Pom starts with a shockingly small backpack, and I only found out how to upgrade it by finally talking to the Tailor vendor I’d initially avoided since I wasn’t going to bother with cosmetics.

Cuisineer feels pretty fascinating and like it could be a potential fit for many different types of Switch player. The split between two types of gameplay seems to be handled well. The story is cute. It just seems some little details and technical issues need to be slightly adjusted, and we could very well see that happen before its January 2025 debut.

Cuisineer will come to the Nintendo Switch, PS5, and Xbox Series X on January 28, 2025, and it is immediately available on the PC via Steam.