While I’ve always enjoyed cooking games, weirdly enough the Cooking Mama series really demonstrated just how much fun they could be, even if a bit culturally insensitive and somewhat silly. Weirdly enough, while there have been plenty of games in that general style since then, there have been very few that have adopted its pretty easygoing formula. One that has absolutely embraced the tougher side of things has been the Cook, Serve, Delicious series, where you’re thrown into the meat grinder every shift, trying to keep pace with incoming orders while feeling like your hands are performing acrobatic feats to fill them all.

With Cook Serve Forever it appears the developer has changed course quite a bit, keeping some of the intensity intact, but changing up the approach with the controls, and then throwing in a pretty compelling storyline to boot. Where before you were really just trying to find success with your food truck, here you’ve got a backstory with a hard-working mother who passed on her love of cooking to her daughter. All grown up, and feeling beaten down by the world, she sees her opportunity to follow in the footsteps of her idol, Chef Rhubarb, and fully realize her culinary dreams.

As with the series to this point, the bulk of gameplay will be focused on food prep. Breaking from its much more chaotic predecessors, Forever has opted for a direction that’s still challenging, but generally feels much more natural. Rather than everything being bound to the recipe directly, you’ll instead learn a wide variety of patterns that correspond to different tasks. This means you won’t be trying to memorize how to prepare anything specific, you’ll instead be tapping into each pattern required to make the dish, and over time this should help you continue to improve as you get the feel for each of them. Since you’ll need to multitask, generally working patterns on each side of your controller, this can make for a real fight between your right and left brain at times, but when you sometimes get into the groove with pretty well parallel patterns it can feel so good to get perfectly in synch on both sides.

While I’m not sure this will necessarily sell people on cooking games on a general level, it is clearly a step forward for this series and should prove to be far more approachable than its forebears. By sprinkling in story elements, plenty of odd characters, and quite a lot of voice work, the experience immediately takes on greater depth that simply wasn’t possible before. By then maintaining a fair degree of challenge, without necessarily overwhelming the player, it really brings everything together to make for a great experience.