Sedap! A Culinary Adventure Review - Sweet and Sour

If there’s one thing that video games need more of, it’s cooking-related games. I don’t mean the mini-games where you throw a bunch of ingredients and use them to buff your main character’s stamina or whatever, I mean games that focus entirely on the food. There’s something so comforting and satisfying about being able to virtually plate up a bowl of food. Perhaps it’s the fact that I don’t have to clean up afterwards or worry about storing the leftovers.

Of course, the bulk of cooking games revolve around serving burgers, pizzas, and salads. While I do love those foods, as a south asian, I do have to ask, “Where’s the rice?” Sedap! A Culinary Adventure answers that question with much cheer. A name that means ‘delicious’ in Malay, Sedap! is an action-adventure co-op cooking game much along the lines of Overcooked, but with some extra toppings.

What's Cooking?

Sedap! follows Som and Gon, aspiring restaurateurs who are looking to expand their culinary horizons. They come across the Makanomicon, a recipe book filled with new recipes. Filled with excitement and curiosity, the duo decides to start a food truck and set out for Khaya Island, an abandoned archipelago brimming with ingredients, monsters, and mysteries. 

Of course, I had to put my relationship with my partner to the test, so while I played as Som, whose strength lies in cooking, my partner played as Gon, the skilled hunter. While both characters are capable of cooking and combat, we quickly learned that we would have to capitalize on each character’s strengths and optimize accordingly. After a few levels, we built a good rhythm where one would venture out and focus on getting ingredients while the other stayed back in the kitchen and served up dishes.

Each level adds a new recipe for you to learn from the Makanomicon, so naturally, the game gets progressively harder. The cooking process is mostly a series of button-mashing, with the final preparation of the dish being a QTE. If you fail it more than three times, you have to make the dish all over again. While on their own, they’re a breeze to get through, the pressure of delivering the dish on time is what will get to you. To my chagrin, I ended up fumbling a few times due to the sheer amount of orders piling up.

To fetch your ingredients, you’ll have to weed your way through enemies and obstacles. Sedap! features simple hack-and-slash combat. You can buy new weapons and charms to alter your stats, and some weapons even unleash a special ability when you charge the attack. You have a health bar, of course, so when you’re knocked out, you need to be revived by your teammate or you have to wait for a few seconds.

At the end of the level, you’ll be rated based on how many dishes you successfully delivered in time, and you’re even granted a bonus based on the freshness of the food as well as how fast you were. You also get to see customer reviews, which, I gotta say, they’re pretty realistic. 

The game slowly reveals more and more mechanics for you to keep in mind, some being hindrances, like a gate that can be only opened when someone stands on the switch, while others assist, like teletotems that allow you to transport items from one part of the area to another.

Charm with a Side of Bugs

In solo mode, you end up playing as both Som and Gon, and the game helps you out in switching between the two when it’s convenient. However, some of Sedap’s mechanics don’t really translate that well into the solo-player version. Your choice of weapon or charm that you choose to equip doesn’t really make all that much of a difference, since you get automatically swapped between the protagonists. Teletotems get rendered useless as you can still transport the item, but you still have to make the trek back to the kitchen. 

The game does adjust your health and the time you get to prepare a dish, but there isn’t anything unique to the solo mode, which makes it feel like an afterthought. Oddly enough, you can’t have separate save files, so if you do want to play solo, you have no choice but to start from the very beginning. In fact, even if you want to play local co-op, you start afresh. 

I tested out both local co-op as well as online co-op while playing Sedap! My partner and I tried playing online, and although we were in the house using the same internet, we both experienced frequent disconnects. We decided to switch to local co-op, and though the connection was much more stable, we still encountered our fair share of bugs and controller disconnects. 

Sometimes the controls would get swapped around, and the X button would become the A button. Other times, the environment would just lock a character into a certain area, leaving us with no choice but to restart the level. Even the UI would sometimes be unresponsive to my controller, and I’d have to switch to keyboard and mouse just to change something in the settings. 

Bugs aside, Sedap! is a real charmer when it comes to visuals and sound. From the protagonists to the monsters, the designs are stinking adorable. As you’d expect from a cooking-based game, each dish looks like something I’d want to eat. The colours are warm and inviting, much like an actual kitchen. The clatter and clinking of woks and pots are a treat for the ears, especially paired with the game’s culturally infused soundtrack.

Final Thoughts - Sedap! A Culinary Adventure

In the shallow pool of cooking games, Sedap! A Culinary Adventure stands proud with its Southeast Asian roots. It’s a genuinely fun game when you’re not faced with frequent disconnects and glitches. It still feels like a dish-in-progress, but if you’re willing to overlook a few hiccups, Sedap! is absolutely worth a try. 

Sedap! A Culinary Adventure was reviewed on PC with a copy provided by the publisher over the course of 20 hours of gameplay - all screenshots were taken during the process of review.