Cook Serve Forever

Genre: Arcade

Players: 1

.

Review:

(Note: This game is included in CSD 1/2 Forever Bundle, along with Cook, Serve, Delicious! and Cook, Serve, Delicious! 2!!. It is also included in CSD 3 Forever Bundle, along with Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3?!. And all four games are included in Forever Delicious Bundle.)

Cook Serve Forever is an Arcade-style game released in 2025 on PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch. This is a spin-off of the Cook, Serve, Delicious! series, and the fourth game in that franchise to release. And while this game has qualities in common with the Delicious trilogy, it differs in two key elements: Simulation elements, and story – this game lacks the former, and has a greater emphasis on the latter than any of the Delicious trilogy games.

Cook Serve Forever follows the story of Nori, a chef aspiring toward culinary greatness who, along with her partner Brie, works towards a goal of winning a famous food competition while making ends meet at home. It’s not exactly a super-inspired or original story, but it helps that the characters are well-written and likeable.

Unlike the Delicious trilogy games, the gameplay in Cook Serve Forever doesn’t have you piecing together custom menu items based on a customer’s order. Instead, you’re presented with two simultaneous tasks, each corresponding to button presses on a different half of the controller, with tasks being replaced by new ones once complete, until the dish is done. These tasks can be pressing a button a specified number of times, pressing a series of buttons, holding down a button or even holding down one button while pressing another, and so on. It’s up to the player how to tackle these tasks, and how to juggle doing them – do you multitask to make things move more quickly, or do you focus to try and avoid mistakes?

It’s an interesting idea in theory, but in practice it’s often frustrating, like trying to pat your head and rub your tummy at the same time, and that’s just when you have predictable, repeating patterns. Sometimes the tasks you need to complete throw a wrench into things and break up a pattern by having one command out of place to throw you off and frustrate perfectionists.

The presentation here is overall very good, at least. This game’s 2D visuals have some really nice character designs, and locales that range from dingy urban environments to fantastical cityscapes, with some of the characters you encounter including odd android creatures that seem to imply this game being set at some indeterminate point in the future (perhaps around the post-apocalyptic 2042 era Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3?! is set in). And thankfully given this game’s focus, the food all looks great, though you won’t be looking at it for the most part as you’ll have your eyes glued to the tasks you need to complete.

These visuals are joined by solid voice acting by the two leads, and backed by a soundtrack of largely upbeat vocal themes that help to make this game sound quite different from just about anything else out there, with some examples including The One, Charlotte’s Theme, Crystallize, and Helianthus Haze, to name a few.

Overall, I’m sure some players will prefer the simplicity of Cook Serve Forever over its more Simulation-focused predecessors, but personally I found that not only do the lack of Simulation elements make for a more shallow game, but one where you feel less like you’re constructing a meal and more like you’re following commands. Plus, the way the game tries to throw you off by breaking up patterns seems like a deliberate choice to cause frustration, making it harder to enjoy this game even on a more shallow level. The game’s characters are charming, and the core gameplay is still more or less enjoyable, so I do think this is still a decent game, but I don’t think this lives up to the legacy of the earlier games in the franchise.

tl;dr – Cook Serve Forever is an Arcade-style game that abandons the Simulation elements of the Cook Serve Delicious series to offer something simpler, with more of a focus on story as you follow a woman who aspires to be a world-class chef. While this game has some good elements, the lack of depth is disappointing, and it seems to deliberately try to make its core gameplay less satisfying by frustrating players. This isn’t a bad game, but it doesn’t live up to the trilogy that preceded it.

Grade: C+

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