Review: Magical Delicacy Fails to Carve Out a Unique Identity

Indulging in hobbies should not be viewed as a pastime, but as a source of deep personal fulfillment and joy. Cooking, in particular, can be a cathartic experience The colors and tantalizing flavors of a well-prepared dish create an unparalleled experience of warmth and satisfaction. Magical Delicacy taps into this love for confectionary-making and merges it with Metroidvania-inspired gameplay. These two interweaving themes create a charming and cozy gameplay experience, but fail to carve out a unique identity and hinders it from reaching the dazzling heights of the genre.

You assume the role of an aspiring young witch named Flora in Magical Delicacy. She has a passion for cooking and embarks on a journey to the harbor town of Grat to prove herself as a witch. Upon her arrival, she meets a frog called Hyge, who is the town’s secretary, and he takes her to a charming, rustic kitchen. Flora immediately begins elevating the kitchen and exploring the town, but of course secrets are lurking within the shadows of Grat that Flora will soon discover. The story itself is pleasant enough, but it never left me invested in the characters or their motivations. This is a shame, as the main character practicing witchcraft should have been a unique plot point to exploit, but it failed to draw me in.

Magical Delicacy‘s central gameplay revolves around you traversing the land, meeting the townfolk, fulfilling their orders in the kitchen, and then delivering the goodies back to them. This starts out reasonably straightforward, as the orders will only require a few simple steps to prepare. For example, buying tailored ingredients from a trader, putting them in a cooking pot, and picking up the meal before it burns and becomes a Kitchen Nightmares reject. But later down the line, the process will become more elaborate, requiring you to scavange the environments for obscure resources, purchase more fancy cooking wares, and even craft ingredients beforehand in a separate cooking process. A good example of this is making bread from scratch before you can make a vegetable sandwich.

How to fulfill these recipes can sometimes be a bit of a head-scratching process, as Magical Delicacy will not give you an exact recipe, but rather a list of criteria that need to be hit. Not everything will always go together, so if certain ingredients do not complement each other or are not cooked correctly, it will result in a failed meal. You will lose the ingredients in that dish. The more you know about cooking, the better starting position you will be in. It embraces the mantra that you can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs. I quite liked that it didn’t necessarily give you step-by-step instructions on how to cook some of these meals, as it created a strangely therapeutic trial-and-error loop. It felt satisfying when I finally figured out what the recipe wanted from me.

My favorite part of the cooking process was utilizing the kitchen shopfront window to sell fully cooked meals to the hungry public. It’s like running a small business, and it’s fun to experiment with different foods and recipes and see how well they will sell. It is also the best way to earn money in the game. I would often find myself being distracted from the ongoing quests and instead try to accumulate money to invest back into my kitchen. You know what they say: when a window of opportunity opens, don’t let it close.

Flora also dabbles in the enigmatic art of witchcraft and can brew potions in her kitchen in Magical Delicacy. You essentially work a double shift, as you can only craft witch-related things during the evening. The night and day aspect should have added an interesting dichotomy to the gameplay, acknowledging the enchanting power of being a witch and how they could harness it to their advantage in the kitchen, but it felt no different to the cooking during the day. So it made these elements feel a bit lackluster, and an inconvenience to wait till the in-game night time to cook potions. Nothing about it felt special.

Magical Delicacy has a beautiful coat of 2D pixelated graphics, which gives the world a unique vibe. The magical world theme complements this, as you will run across anthropomorphic animals, cat ladies, traditional soldiers, and witches, and it made me intrigued to explore the town, the variety of shops, and further beyond to see what I would find next.

Traversing the landscape is very simple, as the platforming segments are not too elaborate or complicated. The map is broken down into small sub-sections, making it easy to track where you are going and not get too lost. Most people should not find the platforming too challenging; however, if you do find some of the platforming portions difficult, there is an accessibility option available that will make the jumps even easier again. It is great to see this game feature this inclusive option.

As you would expect, maneuvering yourself through different platform levels on the map will allow you to reach other locations. These places can range from areas encompassing a bustling town center to a bell tower or large rural spaces. The lower platforms tend to have overgrown, vine-like plants and rocky cave structures, while the higher level is set higher in the sky. Certain food ingredients will also tend to spawn in specific environmental areas, so it’s worth checking all your surroundings.

After completing story-related quests from the townfolk, you will acquire new magical tricks to access areas you could not before. Some of these include casting a mist spell to propel you into the sky or transforming into an ominous black cat that can walk through small, tight spaces. This incentivized me to push through with the quests, even though I didn’t find the story the most compelling, so I could travel further and gain more potential cooking ingredients. Plus, who doesn’t want to transform into a magical black cat?

I did observe a few technical hiccups in Magical Delicacy. The first one was while playing using the controller, the map would regularly not load until I pressed the corresponding button several times. I noticed this would happen more often in the platforming areas as well, where you would most likely interact with the map, which is not ideal. The second issue was the game flat-out crashed on me when I fell off the edge of the map. Hopefully, these are things they can address with patches later, but it’s worth noting if you intend to jump in on day one of release.

Overall, Magical Delicacy offers a cozy and relaxing experience that you can play at a leisurely pace, which makes it inclusive to all players, regardless of skill level. The cooking aspects are done incredibly well, and it creates an enticing gameplay loop where you want to keep making new dishes. However, the game was not ambitious enough with its centralized theme about witches, which had ample opportunities to introduce some fascinating mechanics but failed to capitalize on this, ultimately holding back the experience.

Magical Delicacy is available on the PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X, and the Nintendo Switch version launches on August 15, 2024.