Overcooked 2 is a co-op cooking simulator game where up to four players prepare and cook orders in restaurants. Players gather, prepare, and combine ingredients, as well as serve and wash dishes. The structure of the restaurants is often absurd and contain obstacles – separated moving platforms, hot air balloons, portals and walkways, fires – so coordinating orders under pressure and inevitably bumping into other players creates a hectic, overwhelming space.
I played for the first time with some close friends for around an hour. It was incredibly chaotic as only one of the four of us had had previous experience with the game, and there was lots of screaming, finger-pointing, and exasperation involved. I kept falling off the platforms and causing delays and throwing the ingredients across platforms to other players was tricky at first.
Overcooked 2 lends itself well to people who don’t typically identify as “gamers”. The game is very ungendered, comfortable, and social. One of my male friends was adamant – “No, don’t make the women wash the dishes, I’ll wash the dishes” – in a comically gung-ho-gender-equality way. It has a low barrier to entry and a feasible learning curve with a progression that introduces complexity at a reasonable pace. It also has low stakes – everyone more or less knows that failure and mistakes is an inevitable part of the game. I think this game is a nice refresher from games that have traditionally been unfriendly to beginners and female players. When I look at traditionally male-dominated spaces and games with steep learning curves and high stakes (first-person shooters with men that harass me on voice chat… *sigh*), informal, co-op, social games are a nice departure from that. Obviously first-person shooters and games like Overcooked 2 are extremely different and probably not fair to compare, but I chose a more extreme example for the sake of illustrating spaces that feel more friendly. It definitely helps that similar to other party games like Gartic Phone and Jackbox, Overcooked 2 usually seems to be played with people you know and are comfortable with, so criticism and yelling becomes part of the enjoyment, instead of a deterrent.
Something interesting I realized was that I had to surrender a bit of my tendency to delegate, control, and organize the space for a couple of reasons. One being that I was completely new to the game and I felt that I had to learn the ropes and be somewhat skilled before I even had the credibility to order people around (though I know the latter shouldn’t necessarily be the case, I couldn’t help but think that way). Another reason was that my friends’ play styles were very different. They balance my Type-A personality out very much, often laid-back and nonchalant, which manifested in their play style as well. I was about to hit them with the “okay so what’s the strategy” but one guy was like “let’s just vibe and figure it out, our roles will define themselves as we play”. And it did start to work out, albeit after lots of screaming, and it was nice to let the game flow organically. (Also we were all very tipsy. Maybe that contributed something)
I would love to play more Overcooked 2 and am interested to see how the play style and approach changes with different groups of people.
I enjoyed reading about your experience with Overcooked. I agree with your point that Overcooked is ungendered and there isn’t much of a learning curve. I think the party game feeling of Overcooked makes it fun to have around friends and is also what makes it so successful.