Overcooked! feeds into the fellowship and challenge aesthetic “genres”. In the game, you work as part of a team of cooks in a kitchen struggling to put together as many meals as possible for your customers within the time limit. Overall, the game really stresses teamwork and coordination, while creating an intense sense of urgency (that sometimes leads to yelling during the game). The dynamics that set up this aesthetic feelings are the pressure of time, the players’ varying abilities to “cook” different things, and the requirement for cooks to work together to efficiently create a meal. The mechanics that lead to these dynamics are the ease with which one can perform a cooking action (using one button to chop, one button to plate, one button to boil, etc), the thin corridors used to build the kitchens, and the timers in the game. Since each cooking action is simple to complete, players instead focus on coordination between each other, leading to the requirement to work together to create a meal. Similarly, the thin corridors make it illogical for multiple cooks to try to do move around the kitchen more than necessary to do the same thing at once–players naturally assign someone to each cooking action instead. Finally, the timers add the sense of urgency to the game–although nobody can “lose” Overcooked in the traditional sense, players fight to get as many orders as possible by the time the timer goes off.
