Magical Delicacy (Review)
If there’s one type of game I love the most, it’s the ones that can’t be easily defined. Why limit yourself to a cooking game or a platformer? Why stop at just an adventure or sim? Sometimes you just want to farm a little on the side of your fantasy adventure, right?
Developed by Skaule and published by Whitethorn Games, Magical Delicacy is one of those adventures that understands the multi-genre assignment quite well. Describing itself as a “wholesome pixel art platformer,” Magical Delicacy goes the extra step into being a cute little food delivery sim that not only asks you to platform your way around town and uncover secrets, but make some fun sandwiches and desserts here or there for townsfolk in need.
When Flora moves to Grat, she’s sent to her new home - a lovely, but abandoned little shop which just so happens to also be housing a mysterious stranger who claims to have nowhere else to go. Realizing that she’s stuck with a roommate, Flora accepts that Hina can stay in return for some help. Things get even more mysterious when Flora finds out that not only is she not the only witch in town, but one of the other witches begs her to take in and protect a single, alarmingly large egg. And thus starts a story of witches, dragons, and a little restaurant ready to thrive.
As Flora meets other members of the town, she’s met with tentative “could you please make me some–” orders from nearly everyone. Flora needs to adventure through the town to find ingredients through shopkeepers and foraging, stopping here and there to continue building her kitchen. Most of the platforming is town exploration - players are required to learn how to jump, hop, and sometimes fall their way to new corners of the map.
At the start, it’s admittedly a bit overwhelming - the map is hard to understand, and not every vendor is marked on it. I was struggling to get around for the beginning of the story, to the point where I was almost ready to give up. The platforming aspect is fun when you first are getting somewhere, but getting back and forth - especially multiple times, can feel a bit tiring. You’ll also sometimes get quests that require items that aren’t available to you yet, which can be a bit to navigate. For example, I got plenty of quests that required a cauldron, and was running around trying to figure out why I didn’t have one, since I thought it must be something readily available - instead it turned out I needed to progress in the story.
However, once you get the hang of things and start unlocking different types of movement, such as crow alters and shadow form, it becomes a lot more fun to explore. This is definitely a case where I’d say if you’re feeling a little bit frazzled and struggling with how to get where you need to be, take a break, check a guide, and keep going - it gets a lot better when you can move around more easily, and the exploration feels like less of a chore and more like an adventure. If you’re struggling with platforming, there’s an option to make it a bit less challenging, which can be nice once you’ve unlocked a bunch of the map and are just making your way back and forth.
Making dishes can be really fun - especially because customers will give you unclear orders sometimes. Occasionally someone will request something specific, like a sandwich. But more often than not, you’ll get asked to make something a little earthy, but that doesn’t use honeyspark sugar and isn’t a baked good. Maybe you’ll also need to include a specific ingredient - like a flower. It feels just as good to find THE perfect recipe as it does to experiment and happen upon something they’ll enjoy.
Don’t have the perfect recipe? That’s fine! You can make things even if you don’t have a recipe card for them, allowing you to get creative. Unfortunately the game doesn’t save the recipes that you invent, which means it can be hard to recreate them sometimes unless you remember exactly. This is the one downside to an otherwise really enjoyable cooking system - some games with cooking mechanics force you to make very specific items, or else you just get inedible messes. Magical Delicacy lets you fly free, throwing all sorts of things together to see what they create.
On top of the cozy gameplay, I also really enjoyed talking to the townsfolk in Grat. Characters play off one another, like the princess and her attendant, or the little sister running free. Some merchants are traveling from far-off lands and share stories of where they’ve been. Two adult sisters used to be close until a tragic accident, but clearly still care for one another. It’s fun to get to know the different residents and understand more about them, from their favourite dishes to their dreams of the future.
Magical Delicacy is, as it promises, a wholesome little adventure, and one that I’ve been having a lot of fun with. There are some quality of life updates I’d love to see - such as recipes for found dishes and more robust maps (which in all fairness may be hidden later in the game, as I haven’t finished yet), but overall none of these details are enough to detract from how much I’ve been enjoying exploring the city of Grat and uncovering its secrets. Players who are willing to struggle a little at the start should have a good payoff.
With a few quality of life updates and some more fast travel, I could easily recommend Magical Delicacy to any lover of cozy games, And even without those updates, I would consider this to be one of the most comfy games I’ve played this year, and I genuinely look forward to sitting down for another round of jumping my way across Grat to make sandwiches for the local frogs.
(and you can pet the dragon!)
Available on Steam, Switch, and Xbox, the game currently costs $24.99.
Overall score: 7/10; recommended, with a couple caveats