What’s Cookin’?: Shockingly, Overcooked has Only Made My Relationships Stronger
Ghost Town Games’ Overcooked series is infamous for its stress inducing gameplay and the tension it can create between those who are playing. How many times have you heard couples joke that they can’t play together because it’ll cause a break up? It’s a meme in the gaming community, one that seems to ring true for most people. But my own experience with Overcooked hasn’t been quite as painful.
My mother is not much of a gamer. She didn’t grow up around it, and women her age were never encouraged to dig into “nerdy” pursuits. But despite this, she has a very active interest in them, since they’ve become such a huge part of my life. Due to busy schedules and the continuous slog of life, we haven’t been able to experience a ton together, but the first thing we played together as adults will always stick with me: the original Overcooked.
As you can imagine, playing with someone who doesn’t find using a PS4 controller to be as intuitive as breathing was somewhat stressful. Overcooked’s controls aren’t exactly precise, and there’s a lot for a newbie to manage. It seems like the perfect situation to tank an evening spending time together, but it didn’t. Instead, I got to enjoy teaching my mom how the game worked, and watching her begin to understand its mechanics and best practices for each level. Did we end the night with our entire kitchen on fire and both of us screaming as we tried to put it out? Yes. But did we have a blast while doing it? Definitely. We still talk about playing to this day, even if we’ve never picked it up again.
In the past year, I’ve started sharing the game with another special person: my favorite white boy, Andrew Cogswell. Maybe it’s his goofy ass, teddy-bear-in-real-life personality, maybe it’s that I feel comfy yelling at him about literally anything, but whenever I’m feeling down, playing games with Andrew tends to lift my spirits. So, on a night when I was feeling a bit blue, and deciding I wanted to make good use of my Game Pass Ultimate account, I sent him a message asking if he wanted to stream some Overcooked 2. I don’t think anything I’ve ever done for him has made him quite as happy.
I think all of us were expecting an entertaining, if wildly chaotic, shitshow, and I think all of us were pleasantly surprised. Andrew and I have made a bit of our clashing tastes in media, and just of clashing in general, so I think everyone (including us) assumed this was going to be a disaster. But surprisingly, it went extremely well. Honestly, I think it’s the most in sync we’ve ever been. Sure, our runs certainly weren’t perfect, but we managed to get into a groove pretty easily and it’s consistently been a blast. I loved the experience so much I even asked him if we could buy DLC so we can keep our streams going now that we’re approaching the game’s end.
This column is all about digging into cooking games, and what they bring to the landscape as a whole. While there are tons worth celebrating, Overcooked is the only one I’ve played so far that’s allowed me to share so much joy with people who are close to me. Whether it was teaching my mom in her first real gaming experience, or working out strats with Andrew to snag as many stars as possible, Overcooked managed to bridge gaps in experience and taste in a way that I’ve never seen another game even get close to replicating.
