System Dynamics in Overcooked! 2
Overcooked! 2 (2018) is a digital game developed by Ghost Town Games and Team17 that I played on Nintendo Switch 2. It’s a chaotic, cooperative cooking simulation game where players must chop, cook, assemble, deliver, and wash enough dishes to clear each level. The overall objective is to cook through each kitchen and stop the hungry “Unbread” army from destroying the Onion kingdom. I started playing Overcooked! 2 with my boyfriend at the start of this quarter, and shamelessly, we’ve poured many hours chopping mushrooms and cooking rice (virtually) with the occasional argument over the most efficient strategy to chef up 15 pizzas for a bunch of witches within 5 minutes. We’ve made our way up to level 4-6, which is just over halfway through the entire game.
Overcooked! ‘s target audience is pretty broad; it’s a family-friendly co-op party game aimed at groups of friends, couples, and families who want to play together. Up to four players can play locally on the couch or online.
Overcooked! 2 is hard to put into one genre. While it’s a cooking simulation, it plays more like a real-time action puzzle, and it’s really built to be a multiplayer party game. I think this mix is what makes the game’s system dynamics so easy to see.
Because everything happens in real time, the system shows itself through failure modes. When you leave the rice in the pot for too long, it burns, starts smoking, and catches fire – if you leave it alone, the fire spreads across the counter and becomes a catastrophe. When nobody washes dishes, the orders start backing up because there are no clean plates to serve food. You can see exactly which part of the system broke, all while players yell at each other for it.
Because it’s a party game, the players’ communication becomes part of the system too. The game doesn’t instruct you who should chop and who should cook. Players have to figure that out themselves, out loud, while the clock is running or after they’ve failed to complete a level.
Objects, properties, behaviors, and relationships. Overcooked 2 is a really clean example of Fullerton’s four elements:
- Objects: the chefs, ingredients, stations (like chopping boards or stove tops), plates.
- Properties: mostly states. A mushroom goes from raw to chopped to cooked to burnt, and a plate goes from clean to dirty.
- Behaviors: pick up, put down, chop, wash, dash, and throw. Throwing is new in Overcooked! 2, and although I’ve never played Overcooked! 1, it’s quite useful. Players can toss ingredients across the water to each other or straight into a frying pan, so more resources on the other side of the kitchen become reachable. I believe adding this one behavior increased the space of possibility of scenarios in the game.
- Relationships: Each level feels different because of the kitchen space. The recipes barely change from level to level, but the kitchens change constantly. There are moving walkways, platforms that shift during the level, rafts that shift according to the water current, and portals that teleport you across the kitchen. This reminded me of how a system is more than the sum of its parts. Although the objects, properties, and behaviors stayed the same, the kitchen space completely alters each level. The game designers create variety by changing spatial relationships between chefs and stations, both from level to level and while the level is running.
Information structure and control. The game has a fully open information structure. Every order, recipe, and timer is on screen for everyone to see. The challenge isn’t figuring out what to do; it’s actually cooperating with other players under pressure. Control is direct and real-time – on the Nintendo Switch console, players press buttons to chop, cook, toss, and wash, and move around using the thumbstick.
Feedback loops. The most interesting dynamic for me was how the game snowballs in both directions:
- Positive Feedback. Serving orders back-to-back, in the order they come in, builds up a tip multiplier, so a team in a good rhythm keeps earning more.
- Negative Feedback. One burnt pot means you panic, then lose time putting out the fire, which means no one washes plates, which means the next orders risk expiring.
Both of these are reinforcing loops. Meanwhile, orders keep coming at a steady pace no matter how you’re doing, which keeps the pressure constant.
Emergence. After failing a level, my partner and I always talk about how to strategize and win the level. I think this is where players introduce organized teamwork that the game never explicitly describes – in addition to the existing rules, players add their own rules that make sense to them. For example, I suck at aiming and tossing ingredients across a room, so I stuck to chopping and cooking locally near my station. My partner assembles the cooked ingredients and serves them, and delivers dishes to my side of the kitchen so that I can wash them and place more cooked ingredients on them. This is never an explicit rule presented by the game designers, but our own rule that emerged during gameplay.
Loops and arcs. Using Daniel Cook’s framework, Overcooked 2 is almost entirely loops:
- A few seconds: grab, chop, cook, plate, serve, wash.
- About 30 seconds: one order.
- A few minutes: a whole level, which we replayed until we got three full stars.
These stack into a skill chain. First you learn the basic actions like chopping and washing, then cook timing and throwing, then how to juggle several orders at once, and finally how to split up roles as a team. The arcs are thin: such moments are the “Unbread” story cutscenes, or driving the bus around the overworld to unlock new levels. They give the loops a reason to exist, but it’s the overarching sub-story which is revisited once in a while.
Moreover, Overcooked! 2 seems to be a formal system. The rules are clear, every action has a predictable result, and the scoring and star thresholds are exact numbers. But how each level actually goes depends on the people playing and how you strategize across players. The system is formal, but the fun experience really comes from the social layer that is created on top of the system itself.
Values. The values the game rewards are cooperation, communication, and dividing up work. It also has a value I didn’t expect, which is that the chaos becomes funny. Players can’t help but laugh and face-palm when they fall off the cliff or get run over by a car, for the tenth time during gameplay. The chaos is the point, and messing up together becomes part of the fun rather than something to be ashamed of.
Inspiration and criticism for my own system games. What I want to take away is how much the game gets out of layout and one small new behavior. Instead of adding lots of new rules, the designers mostly change where things are, and the new throwing behavior alone opens up a whole new layer of strategizing. I also really like how readable the game’s state is through visual cues. Progress bars, smoke, and fire tell you what’s happening without any text. And because failure is loud and funny, and sometimes stressful, it’s tempting to try just one more time to try and clear the level.
My main criticism is that the game can be rough when players have different skill levels. One slower player can hold the whole team back, which can make playing together frustrating instead of fun. Some levels were just purely stressful – one specific level had two bars that split the whole kitchen into four. If the two players are stuck on one side until the bars move again, the stovetop risks bursting into flames because you can’t take the overcooked rice off the fire. For my own games, this reminds me to think about balancing for players with different skill levels, and prioritize fun over overly difficult gameplay spaces.
All in all, Overcooked! 2 is a game with simple objects and properties but with many fun levels created from different combinations of spatial relationships. In the end, the game is less about cooking but more about how multiple people learn to work inside a system together, and that’s what I want to remember when designing my own system games.
