There are a lot of multiplayer co-op cooking games out there, allowing you to get frustrated with your friends while you all work together to cook a dish. In Ominous Stew, you are not working together. As a matter of fact, you both are actually in different worlds, trying to ruin each other’s restaurant.
I’m not sure if either cook in Ominous Stew has a drive for cooking, as the dishes themselves are determined by hitting specific bars based on the type of food. Protein might be needed, which means you might need to add tofu. Starch might be needed, so you could add potato. When making a dish, you need to make sure you are using your ingredients wisely and getting as close as you can to the blue bar goal.
Once a dish is served to your customer on your side of the world, you will gain power towards a super power. These powers allow you to mess with your opponents kitchen, adding in walls or fires or doing damage to areas so it’s harder to walk around.
The kitchens themselves in Ominous Stew are wild. There are upper sections that you need to run into fires to get to, walls that have to be jumped across, and all of your customers just appear — so they don’t mind in the slightest. It’s pretty wacky and doesn’t feel conventional at all.
When it comes to the ingredients used to make your strange dishes, you can easily start to run out. You do get more back in waves, but you’ll need to manage the ingredients you have so that you don’t end up being unable to fulfill dishes. It feels like quite a lot to pay attention too, adding to the chaos and frantic nature of the game. You do need to move on plates too, just giving you another task to pay attention to!
I got to play a few levels of Ominous Stew at Gamescom, where I really enjoyed how different and not-focused-on-food the game was. Currently, you can wishlist it on Steam.
