You’ll need both logic and foresight in order to get the dish out the door in Neon Noodles.
Chefs are way overrated, all they do is simple food preparation – which games such as overcooked have proved I can do whilst on fire and in the middle of an earthquake. Ergo, I am a master chef. But I am but a simple human being, with naught but two arms, and, well, I’m super slow. Neon Noodles needs a master chef with the deft speed of a robot.
This however is not true for robots! Equipped with as many arms as you desire, and as fast as a speeding engine, robots are much more suited for cookery, and you can even have multiple ones operating in synergy, for super efficiency.
Neon Noodles, at its core, gives you the task of making some yummy food, and then you must create a kitchen and program robots in the kitchen to make that food as quickly and efficiently as possible. Starting from barrels of basic food, you must chop, boil, mix, roll, cook and a whole pile other verbs to make the food, which gets very complicated, providing the long list of commands you feed to the robots to do your tasty bidding. Even more interesting is when certain actions take time to do, like leaving the meat to cook in a pan, requiring you to then go do something else whilst waiting for the first take to finish, making my head feel like it is not screwed on right.
Programming all of these robots is like crack for me. Obsessivising over the lines of actions, searching for that one little change to make, before pulling the theoretical thread and ending up deleting everything because I thought of a new system to layout this kitchen. As the recipes get more complex, requiring multiple robots working in both series and parallels, and sometimes both to try and make the delicious food fast enough I very quickly get out of my depth, which is very sad.
A highly enjoyable game, slotting right in with other great machine-building puzzle games like the excellent Opus Magnum and some amazing flash games back in the day, Neon Noodles combines razor-sharp mechanical thinking with the delicious world-travelling-ness of making lovely food. Yummy.
Neon Noodles will be available for both PC and Linux soon. You can wishlist it, and play the demo, over on Steam.
