Magical Delicacy is a unique blend of Metroidvania gameplay and cooking sim mechanics that come together for a surprisingly stress-free experience. You play as Flora, a young witch who moves to the harbor town of Grat to find out more about herself. Quickly after making landfall, she’s Tom Nooked into her very own home and storefront that she can pay off at her leisure. While the setup is simple in premise, it can take a bit to understand the game fully and its various systems. This was partly the reason why I restarted my save after I understood the basics after an hour or so. That’s not to say that the game is confusing. I just found it easier to take it from the top once I understood the main gameplay loop.
Pretty soon after Flora gets her shop (called Flora’s Magical Delicacies), you are free to roam around the town, harvest ingredients, talk to people, and fulfill orders. Though Flora does have a storefront to sell her cooked goods, Magical Delicacy is not a restaurant sim. In fact, I mostly used the shop to pawn off dishes I messed up. To that end, I’d describe the game as more of a simple Metroidvania with cooking-centric quests.
Grat is a town full of people who want food-related favors and as a nice witch looking to put her cooking skills to the test, Flora is the perfect friend to make. Their requests often come with a caveat or two that you have to be conscious of when cooking or you’ll end up with invalid dishes. The townsfolk are interesting, with slow character growth that makes some of them endearing but none so compelling that I could pick favorites. The writing starts out a bit stiff but part of that plays into Flora’s enigmatic personality. Due in large part to her trusty response of “Great” in the face of most adversities.
Now this is a cozy game where you live in a town of colorful characters so the comparison to a certain Valley is to be expected but not apt. You can certainly spend your days making random recipes with ingredients you grow from your garden and sell them in your shop, but that gameplay loop is not all too satisfying by itself. Exploring Grat and advancing the plot is a more engaging system than simply inhabiting it. Progressing through the significant quests opens up more of the town, allowing you to find nooks and crannies where special ingredients grow or secret boxes are hidden.
In regards to the traversal, Magical Delicacy is very accessible. The game’s platforming is not too difficult, allowing you to play at your own pace, but if you need further assistance, there are options in the settings that can get rid of crumbling and disappearing platforms so you can parkour around Grat safely. This is part of the reason I call Magical Delicacy a stress-free experience. While there is a day and night cycle, you aren’t given a timer for each quest on when to get it done.
I won’t consider this next point a negative but you might depending on the type of player you are. Due to its stress-free design, Magical Delicacy is a game that demands player agency. There is no map by default, you have to go find it from a vendor. And once you acquire it, there are no points of interest, that is also something you can get from the vendor. And if you want to set waypoints and markers, that is one more thing you can purchase from the vendor.
It’s a similar situation for the quests. Because there is no time limit on them, you can do them at the pace you feel best. Paired with this hands-off approach to game design are the cooking mechanics. The real surprise here is how “authentic” the cooking is in Magical Delicacy. I think the best way to explain this is to walk you through making a sandwich in the game.
You start off by harvesting some wheat in your garden. Then you take it to the grinder and wait a few seconds for it to turn into wheat flour. Then you take that to the oven, where you add in rocksalt and wait a bit more for the bread to bake. After that, you take the bread, and any vegetables and spices you also picked up, and take it to the cutting board where, you guessed, you have to wait around for a bit more before it’s ready. And unlike with ingredient harvesting, where you have to play through a quick time event, for cooking you simply sit and stare. The waiting isn’t atrocious but it makes cooking a very manual process.
And the waiting doesn’t end there. The reason I said the shop-keeping mechanics aren’t entirely satisfying is that you need to be in the store to sell items. You have a sidekick who mooches off your space and occasionally asks for food, but that isn’t enough right away. If you open the store window for business, you have to be inside the house. As I said earlier, I found myself mainly using the shop to get rid of items I messed up for quests. For me, these are points of friction and while the story is interesting enough by itself to bring me back day after day, the cozy cooking and shop-keeping needlessly slow down the gameplay.
Backing all this up are strong visuals. The detailed pixel art of Magical Delicacy looks undeniably nice to look at and the nice parallax effect adds a unique sense of depth to the otherwise flat world. This gives players a sense of scale to the town of Grat as it expands well into the background. Another nice touch is the way Flora interacts with the world. As Flora runs around, lit candles will go out, pots will break, and hanging lanterns will sway after being bonked. (Though it is an odd choice that the pots respawn every day and always drop currency.) The visuals are also accompanied by a simple score that harmlessly loops in the background for each area.
To put it all together, Magical Delicacy still sort of feels like an Early Access game. That’s not to say it’s broken (though it certainly has its quirks like the menu not opening when you’re on the stairs). I more so mean that the game needs tweaking before I can recommend it without hesitation. To the credit of the game’s solo developer Skaule, there has already been a minor update that made changes to several things from inventory capacity to jump timing. Normally this sort of feedback is given during QA but being an indie game, it falls on the early adopters.
If that’s okay with you and you want a cozy game to get lost in for a while, Magical Delicacy is out now on Xbox Series X|S and PC as well as Xbox Game Pass. The Nintendo Switch version arrives later this month. A code was provided by the publisher for review. For more cozy games from Whitethorn Games, click here to read my review for Botany Manor and click here to read our interview with Whitethorn Games CEO.
