Help Yourself! Let's Play Overcooked

Overcooked is a co-op game about a team of short-order cooks, designed to be played by two to eight hands.

The year is 20XX, and the Ever Peckish has arrived. Its seemingly infinite hunger threatens the very world in which we cook. The Onion King believes we're too weak to satiate its belly, as our "cooking skills are lacking" and our "cooperation is woeful." Using the magic of time travel, he sends us back to 1993 so we'll have time to hone our skills.



What's that? Two to eight "hands"? Not players? Correct. Observe:



It's possible in theory for one two-handed player to control two characters.

But how about in practice? Dungeons and Dragons teaches us it is impossible to concentrate on two things at once without the use of a simulacrum. This is backed by science. When we think we're multitasking, we are in fact merely rapidly switching back and forth between separate tasks. This is horribly inefficient.
Step 1: construct a simulacrum.
Unfortunately, I am not a wizard of appropriate level to control such magics.

I'll have to go it alone.

Things are now even more dire than they seem. People don't even know how bad they are at multitasking. Those who claim to be good at it actually perform worse than those who say they're bad.
This makes step 1 obvious: claim to be bad at multitasking.
I've run a regression analysis on the data, and from it have concluded that merely making this claim offers an expected 27% increase in my efficiency.

With this in mind I took the first steps on a confusing and very slow journey that would get me far higher scores than teamwork with my girlfriend, and allow me to espy the wonderful world of neuroscience.



Thanks to the flipping of your eyes' lenses, images on the right side of your field of view hit the left side of your retinas, which fast-track signals all the way to the back of the left side of your brain to the occipital lobe. Brain hemispheres enjoy controlling opposite sides of the body, so your right hand has a physical advantage when reacting to things to the right of where you're looking that runs deeper than just a synesthetic association of an object being on the same side as that hand.

If you want your left hand to interact with anything to the right of your focus, that command has to first travel through the corpus callosum to the right side of the brain. People who've had this left-right connection severed are in the strange situation of having their left hand disagree with what they verbally claim they saw.



Thankfully my connection is fully intact, but this knowledge will no doubt save me milliseconds of mental computing time and allow me to improve by training the right way. But hold on... who's to say you even can train at multitasking to begin with? Who's to say attempting to multitask won't just make you worse at it the more you try? Both my brains, that's who.

GENERAL BAD THINGS
1. Your eyes can only focus on one thing at a time. You are forced to rely on memory and peripheral vision for the character you're not looking at.
2. Controlling opposing sides of the screen from your hands is possible (I'm capable in random short bursts), but is extremely difficult at the moment. I.e. left side with right hand, and vice-versa.

GENERAL GOOD THING
Coordinating item hand-offs is far easier alone than with another player. This is your only advantage.

GENERAL TIPS
1. Have as many things going simultaneously as possible. If your options are "continue what I'm doing" or "start something new," it's almost always a good idea to start a new thing. This is a time management game, so if one character is doing nothing, you're losing time even if the other character is busy.
2. Mentally queue up actions for one character before mentally switching your focus to the other. Walls are your friends. You'll have to rely on this mental list of commands and your memory to do things you aren't looking at.
3. Hit the pause button now and then for more time to assess the situation and ensure you're correctly prioritizing. This isn't cheating. You have my word.



Experiments will be documented below.

Tutorial:
My laptop doesn't like this place, so lagging controls had me misplacing items. I'll reupload this once I have access to my diesel-powered desktop.
1-1:
I'm in the soup store! Nothing but onions get ordered here. You only have two plates, but there's plenty of time to wash them and get a good rhythm going.

This game seems neat! And playing it by one's self seems bonkers so I'm pretty impressed at your efficiency here!

We are now entering the stages that are highly enjoyable and offer large amounts of fun. These are the places that are relaxing to practice on and let you show off because there's still not too much to think about. Don't be distracted from the task at hand: stopping the flying spaghetti menace.

(All the music in this game is public domain. Have I mentioned it's great?)

1-2: STILL SOUP
Instead of just onions, we now have tomatoes to work with. If you mix them, you'll have to throw out the concoction completely, since there are no mixed soup orders in the game. The middle of the road has people walking through that can block your way, but never more than a second, so they're safe to ignore.

1-2: HI, SEAS
This is the first boat stage. These are all characterized by various tables and objects rocking back and forth in a predictable manner. For this stage in particular, if you don't predict the sway, it's easy to get trapped in the wrong side of the boat and have to run around to get back; this also switches which characters are doing which actions, so I play cautiously to avoid it. This is one of the stages with an outsourced dishwasher, so we never have to worry about not having plates--hallelujah.

1-3: BURGER CHAIN
Our first non-soup restaurant has opened. Burgers are... complicated. With soup we could merely cut an ingredient, cook, plate, and serve. With burgers, we need to ground the beef, cook it, add a bun, plate it, and optionally add lettuce, or lettuce and tomatoes (both of which need to be cut).
Frying meats takes longer than cooking soups. You'll want to have a few of them started early, then get a lot of plates with buns ready, chopping lettuce (and rarely tomatoes) when you can. This place generously offers five plates, so even if we serve four burgers in a row we won't need to be too concerned about cleaning.





If you're wondering what the warning beeps are when something has been cooking for too long, that means you're at risk of a fire starting. Fire sucks. It's hot and gets everywhere, ruining all food it touches and making your tools unusable. It will need to be extinguished, and all burned food thrown away. Even one small fire is a huge waste of time because of the work it undoes, so don't press your luck.

1-4: NARROW CORRIDORS
Three soup options, but with a twist: there's only enough room for one character in most of the level, preventing you from running past eachotherself. Pronouns are becoming difficult.

1-5: FRISCO
Looks like a normal burger stage, but our heroes find it's built over an extremely discrete fault line. Buns and most stoves are on the right, while all other ingredients, cutting boards, and the sink are on the left. If you're not careful you'll end up with a bunch of finished food, but no way to get clean dishes to serve any of it.

2-1: IS THIS SAFE?
This kitchen is broken up between between two moving vehicles, because we're busy people and have places to be. We've got automatic dish-washing helping us, but being only rarely able to interact between the two trucks means you'll have to have a plan (prepped correct ingredients) ready for when they meet back up.

(audio has de-synced in the first section for some reason. Wasn't like this on the test watch, weirdly. It's fixed after that.)

We made it all the way to 1995, so let's keep on trucking all the way to 1999.

2-2: RATS
This soup kitchen's twist is the real big city experience: vermin. Any ingredients left untouched for more than a few seconds will be stolen by rats. You probably won't leave ingredients out very often, but for the times you do, keep nearby to scare off the thieves.

2-3: ENDLESS CONVEYORS
Your other half has been confined behind the wall with no escape. Your only form of communication is the language of cooking. Real tip: keep plates on the left to easily move cooked meat without having to move pans too, and keep ingredients on the right because near-finished products are heading there anyway. Transfer dirty dishes as soon as possible, since there's a lot of extra wait time on this one, and your backroom lady is already extremely busy.

2-4: SEGMENTED CONVEYORS
These conveyors empty into trash bins, from which no food may return. Three plates, three pans, three slabs of beef--a simple cycle. Similar to the last stage, but if you neglect something on a belt, say goodbye.

I agree!

On a related note, this game has really good sound design - the little pops when you pick up/put down food are quite pleasing. I think in general this is a pretty cute game!

This continues to be insane and I love it. You're nearly outperforming my best groups of 5 (need that kitchen manager).

Yep, and there are a lot of character options to choose from. Levels are about to get brutal. Ahead of us are the frozen tundra, magical woods, an active volcano, and outer space before the apocalyptic spaghetti monster returns.

That's good to hear. I'm actually interested in throwing my coworkers into the fray when the opportunity comes like I did with KTANE.




I thought we were studying neuroscience, not physics.

3-1: FISH AND CHIPS FRIES
The Onion King now trusts us around boiling oil, the absolute madvegitable. Oil fryers cook with frightening efficiency; they don't require the prepwork of stew pots needing many ingredients to fill, and also only need half the time as stovetop pans to render our food technically safe for consumption.
This would all be great if we didn't have slippery ice physics and zero walls. If you're wondering why Manchef falls in the icy water, it's because working around fryers can be hot work, and sometimes you need to take a dip to cool off.

3-2: ROCK THE BOAT
This is the first stage in which nothing new is introduced, which alone makes it a new thing. I don't do it perfectly every time, but there's a great cycle here that feels slick as hell to pull off. The wrinkle is plate access; running out of plates forces characters away from their cutting boards for a few seconds and might not let you complete it every time.

3-3: ON THE GO
Another moving vehicle stage, but the twist this time is there's a full set of cooking tools on both sides--one for soups, one for fish & fries. It's impossible to 3-star this one if each chef is only thinking about him/her(/your)self. The trick is to realize fish guy can cut vegetables and veg lady can cut fish. You must prepare ingredients you won't be able to use, then truck them over to your other chefbrain.

3-4: GO WITH THE FLOE
Shouldn't penguins be able to eat fish raw? Having only fried items makes things a little easier than usual, but there's still slippery ice physics, now with the added bonus of moving platforms. Be very careful with dashing, as it's easy to knock eachotherself into the water. Two plates and three fryers? The gods mock us.

4-1: PIZZA
Moving forward in time, we gain access to the greatest food. Invented in 2002 by John Pizza, it has become a beloved staple of the American household. Roll the dough, ctrl+x the tomatoes into a ctrl+v, shred the cheese, optionally adding chopped pepperoni or mushrooms, cook, and serve piping hot at my door for low prices.
Similar to boat stages, haunted mansions have regularly moving tables that may have necessary cooking tools on them. Instead of all going back and forth, however, they might move in nonsensical patterns.

4-2: DARKNESS AND DOUBT
A soup stage. A throwback to simpler times. The only difference here is you're in total darkness and can't see more than a few feet in front of you, forcing you to form a mental map of the area and work from memory.



Apparently I've overcome a mental roadblock, as I no longer seem to have difficulty controlling opposite sides of the screen from my hands. Not only have I broken physical laws, I seem to have now transcended the constraints of mortals, and may be close to achieving CHIM.

Remember when I said this?
Those times are over. From here on I'm not going for cool cycles or scoring, and will mainly just try to do well enough for 3 stars.



4-3: A TERRIBLE NIGHT
Burger-only haunted mansion, and what a haunt it is. Most of the burger ingredients, food delivery, and sink are all in different quadrants. Each quadrant of the mansion relates to the others in different ways every 30 seconds, which may leave your peopleself unable to reach needed items or tools. Also the meat and pans move around on their own too.

4-4: DOUBLEKITCHEN
Your left side has frying pans, but no burger ingredients.
Your right side has pizza ovens, but no pizza ingredients.
This level is devious already, but on top of that, item movements are one-way, so you're always in a position of one person waiting to be able to deliver items to the other. The direction of where items can be delivered switches every 30 seconds. Dirty dishes cannot be taken to sinks besides setting them aside and waiting for the room to change, and you can end up completely separated from all clean dishes. We're getting real tired of these ghosts.

5-1: SPACE
The year is 2008, and astronauts are hungry for burritos. We now have access to tortillas, rice, and chicken, so let's get cracking. It may be tempting to join forces on the same side of the station, but then you'll only have one meat item cooking at a time, which is a real bottleneck. Grab what you need for two or three orders, and send the shuttle to your partner.
Space levels usually have walled-off room segments similar to mansions, but you're in complete control of them, rather than at the mercy of ghosts' whims.

5-2: LAVA
You thought cooking from the side of a moving vehicle was dangerous? It is, and this is dangerouser. We've got burritos again, but this time rice is the bottleneck.
This stage has changing accessibility based on the rising and falling of rocks, but you're never completely blocked off from anything. There's less risk of falling off compared to ice stages, as friction is still normal... Also there's just a cannon shooting dangerballs across the room. I have no explanation for it. My guess is it fell out of an unused ship stage.



My friends have observed that all dirty dishes return as if they had spaghetti, regardless of what the plates actually carried. This is true. To investigate this phenomenon, I isolated food scraps and observed their molecular form via electron gastronomy. I have deduced spaghetti to be food trash, explaining why no one in the game orders it.

Hmph... Typical poltergeist bullshit.

5-3: IN THE NOT-TOO-DISTANT PAST
Again astronauts love burritos. The twist here is our ingredients and cutting boards are closed off behind automatic doors. Unfortunately, some goofball wired the station like spaghetti, so Manchef's floor opens Ladychef's door, and vice-versa. With some practice I could squeeze in another couple orders, but the game seems to think this is a much harder stage than it actually is, so netting a 3-star rating doesn't take much.

5-4: HELL'S KITCHEN, or AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
This is the worst kitchen in the game. You may have noticed all the levels are built using a pretty discrete square grid. NOT SO. This is the exception. Tables and stoves float around you in smooth gradients in a figure-8 pattern, making it extremely easy to miss item placements. You don't have access to everywhere the platforms go, so if you time a stove wrongly, food can easily catch fire behind the delivery window with no way of putting it out. Just like real Hell! Rather than waiting on tables to transfer needed items, it's usually best to just plunge yourself dome-deep into magma and "throw" them, dying horrifically. Throwing is not a real mechanic of the game, but a remnant of the physics engine that occurs when you drop an item while dashing. This is okay to do because the game cheated first. You have my word.

5-5: LAST SUNDAY, A.D.
This is another segmented soup kitchen, but one chef has access to nothing but cutting boards. That makes planning for them easy; if they're not cutting something, they're wasting time. The other chef will need to shuttle over ingredients, do the cooking, and wash the dishes.

5-6: SLOW GOING
Automatic doors, plus segmented-into-trash conveyors in different rooms. This level's rather inconvenient to get anything done in. Luckily the customers are abnormally patient, so you'll only need to complete a handful of orders to 3-star it.



With this, we've completed all the "normal" kitchens. One final round of trials awaits, after which the Onion King is 70% confident we'll be capable of taking on the noodly menace.

6-1 IMPORTER-EXPORTER
Here we have a soup boat that doesn't just rock back and forth, but laterally as well. Normally the chefs would be separated the whole time, but if you pay attention during lateral shifts, a chef can slip into the other's section, doubling your cutting ability for a while until the boat rocks back and requires you separate again.

6-2 MAGNUM OPUS
This is the most fun kitchen in the timeline. The left and right sides are 180-degree rotations of each other, allowing some bizarrely intuitive controls and hilarious synchronized activities. There are segmented conveyors to pass ingredients across, but if you're lucky on orders you won't need them. Both sides have everything they need to do wonderfully timed cycles the whole way through.

6-3 GO WITH THE FLOE 2: I SEE
Previous tundra levels have usually has at least a little snow where you can walk with traction and not slide. No longer. This one's not only entirely ice (even the parts that look like snow), but requires you cross two moving platforms three times each to deliver a single order. Always be transporting something so none of these trips is wasted.

6-4 ORBIT
Soup, burgers, and salads in space. All ingredients and delivery windows are distributed in an outer ring of 4 rooms, of which we'll only have access to 2. This ring can be rotated in either direction via switches. It's thankfully not complicated, as the sink, pots, pans, and cutting boards are all in the center for easy access.



THE YEAR IS 20XX, AND THE EVER PECKISH HAS ARRIVED...

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