The dragon living in my house is definitely a problem, but that can wait. I’m experimenting with my new cookware. But I still need to comb through the difficult catacombs on the edge of town. And pay off my house… And harvest the crops in the garden. Decisions in Magical Delicacy are a real witch sometimes.

Magical Delicacy adds intriguing wrinkles to the well-worn path of cooking life sims. Fiendish platforming challenges, a sprawling map I’ve barely filled in, and wildly open-ended ingredient systems form an endlessly compelling gameplay loop. But one I can untangle myself from to progress the main story. Eventually.

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Town Meeting

Flora arrives in the harbor of Grat from the remote north, looking for witchy mentorship. She immediately gets something more complicated. One town witch offers an ominous warning. The other desperately asks her to hide a warm, pulsating egg in her new storefront. Flora’s cryptic roommate, Hina, isn’t thrilled, but they reluctantly agree.

But not everyone is happy to see Flora, and this undercurrent runs through the architecture itself. Abandoned catacombs rest right beneath the sparse town square. Flora gets the run of a long disused shopfront, but with the expectation to pay the loan back in both money and labor. Luckily, she can really cook.

Arcane Rituals

Here’s Magical Delicacy’s workflow: Talk to townsfolk, get cooking orders from them, obtain and prepare ingredients, deliver. Complete one order for a more complicated one. Fill more orders for a peek into the person, the town, or a new aspect of gameplay. Sell leftovers to make up the difference. Use that to travel through more of the map. And though it sounds dry on paper, in practice my day-to-day in Grat took on a chaotic fluidity.

I had to unlearn old habits to properly grapple with Magical Delicacy. For the first few days of my PC playthrough, I reflexively went to sleep when it was dark out. But my assumption that I would be in trouble for staying up late backfired. Some residents only come out at night. Certain plants are easier to find. And ghostly blue platforms materialize once the moon is out, revealing alternate platforming routes. In witch world, sleep is for the weak.

Crop Circles

Magical Delicacy’s scaffolding is built on its magnificent cooking system. Despite getting a game key weeks in advance, I was so transfixed by my potential culinary options that I barely grazed the story.

Flora gathers plants and herbs out in the wild or buys them from a shop. Each ingredient has a rarity, a flavor, and limits to what kitchen tools it will respond to. Certain preparation methods will alter an ingredient’s form, flavor profile, or uses. In other words, like the real cooking process.

Coasting off my incorrect assumptions from earlier, I quickly ran out of funding in the early game. I had fulfilled every order I had a recipe for, and hoovering up currency from breakable pots had me barely scraping by. So I gathered the few plants in my garden and went to the cutting board.

One scrap of grain and one vegetable later, my jaw dropped. In my desperation, I improvised a vegetable canape. And making it out of thin air added the recipe to my arsenal. I sold it from the store window for a tidy sum. Back in business, baby.

Thoughts So Far: I’m Feeling the Burn in Magical Delicacy

Magical Delicacy’s cooking system lands snugly between Battle Chef Brigade’s tactical gathering and Style Savvy’s trait system. And with every new gadget from the blacksmith, the possibilities widen. When I’m done tearing through recipe combinations, I’ll get back to the main story. But for now, I’m fully locked into the kitchen life.

For more first impressions, stay tuned to Press SPACE to Jump!