Adventure Corner ~ Magical Delicacy

Welcome to Adventure Corner, a column where members of the RPGamer staff can give their thoughts, impressions, and pseudo-reviews for various adventure titles that don’t come under our usual coverage. Adventure Corner is aimed at delivering opinions on a wide range of titles including visual novels, point-and-click adventures, investigative mysteries, and so forth.

In this edition of the column we take a look at Magical Delicacy on the Nintendo Switch.


Magical Delicacy

Platform: Switch
(also available on PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S)
Release Date: 07.16.2024
Publisher: Whitethorn Games
Developer: Skaule

 

In the world of indie games, certain genres rise and roll upon the waves of popularity. Metroidvanias are plentiful, but other styles also abound. Things like the meister genre, which is centered on characters running a shop and making things work in a colorful world. What you don’t often see is a combination of these particular genres, but that’s what we have today: Magical Delicacy, now available on Steam, Xbox consoles, and Nintendo Switch.

Flora, plucky witch protagonist, has left her home in provincial Ulport for a new life in the cliff city of Grat. Once upon a time, this city was famed as the entrance to a great, magical riverwild. It was also home to many witches who plied their trade to support the Ryverfarer Guild in the quest for new and interesting materials. It’s been two generations since the guild won out over the dragons that once dominated the riverwild, however, and Grat’s not the city it used to be. Broad sections of town are in dire need of maintenance, while others are crumbled away. Flora doesn’t know about this when she enters port, and so doesn’t understand at first how her arrival causes a stir in the local economy. She’s met by a city bureaucrat at the very start, and faster than you can say ‘subprime mortgage loan rates,’ she finds herself with a shop, a debt to pay off, and an annoying, accidental roommate who never seems to leave the building.

Making your shop a home!

There’s one thing to do, and that’s get to work. Flora’s specialty is cuisine, using her magical command of Ember, Mist, and Umbra to set kitchen implements to run on their own while she multitasks. Anything with an open flame must be watched carefully so it doesn’t scorch, but otherwise these culinary processes can be left to their own devices. As the game continues, Flora can invest in more tools and recipes to expand her menu and fulfill the requests of people all across the city.

These requests range from highly specific to frustratingly vague, with conditions for ingredients to use or not use, preferred flavor profiles, or even whether it’s day or night when Flora cooks it. Even though it’s technically allowable to provide something that doesn’t fit all the conditions, the witchy chef’s own standards prevent her from doing so. This makes every delivery request into a puzzle to determine just how the necessary results are possible. Thankfully, there are no time limits on requests, and the day/night cycle mainly exists to provide environmental changes and a special limitation on potions (most of which must be made while the moon is in the sky).

If cooking is the game’s first challenge, the other challenge is the navigation of Grat itself. Magical Delicacy is technically a Metroidvania in terms of exploration, and the game provides a good deal of parkour platforming as Flora figures out how to get from Point A to Point B, often by way of Point E before the shortcuts unlock. Along the way, she picks up exploration tools such as a lamp, a double-jump charm, and various spells that allow her to leap, fly, or creep past obstacles. In the nooks and crannies of Grat, catacombs hold treasure and special costume palettes, not to mention some of the most difficult parkour challenges in the game.

When the moon’s in the sky like a big shepherd’s pie…

One thing that is not a challenge is combat, because Magical Delicacy does not have any. Flora is a chef de cuisine, not a mistress of battle magics, and everything else in the game aligns around that dynamic. There isn’t even a health bar to deplete, so damage from spikes simply forces Flora back a step, while falling off the side of one of Grat’s many cliff faces sees her safely deposited on terra firma a moment later. While characters may disagree with each other strongly about certain matters, the world itself is a peaceful one, even to the menu, which is almost entirely vegetarian.

Something else to appreciate is the game’s commitment to making itself accessible, to the point of asking the player at the start of a new game file whether they’d like to see the options.  There are toggles for colors, for outlining, for text variations more friendly to those with vision issues or dyslexia, and a host of other items, major or minor, that help the player tailor the experience to their comfort.

Be it ever so mortgaged, there’s no place like work.

Also appreciated is the sorting system for ingredients and inventory, allowing the player to locate items by type or flavor. It’s a good interface, and better than many meister games I’ve played in the past.  My only complaint is that it would have been even better if the player could combine variables, i.e. ‘vegetable with sour taste’, or else search specifically for items capable of drying, juicing, grinding, roasting, or enchantment. A master list of ingredients to reference for flavor profiles and harvest locations would also have been appreciated.

Magical Delicacy is an interesting experiment in both the limitations and breadth of its component genres. Metroidvania and meister have their distinctive elements, and the combination of the two works surprisingly well here. The underlying philosophy of the game’s developers helps to make an engaging narrative experience that does not rely on physical conflict between people yet at the same time is intensely physical in its platforming challenges, balanced against the mental contortions of planning a perfect recipe for the request at hand. And thus, strange as it may seem, a meister-vania makes for a delectable blend of tastes.

 

 

Disclosure: This article is based on a free copy of the game provided by the publisher.

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