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This Thanksgiving, Try Managing Your Own Restaurant

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by Casey Fields

As the holidays approach, many among us begin to think about some of the most important things in our lives, like video games. With Thanksgiving on the horizon, let’s take a moment to look into some games that evoke what many people think about when they think of Thanksgiving: food.

When I think of food games, my mind quickly goes towards games like Delicious, Diner Dash, and Overcooked, games where the focus is both on preparing food and managing the restaurant in which it is served. Restaurant management sims tend to focus on a trio of gameplay elements: time management, money management, and happiness management. Let’s take a second to break each of these down. I’ll be using Delicious as an example.

Delicious Delicious Vol 1

Delicious

We begin with time management, the most layered pillar of these games. In Delicious, you play as Emily, an amateur restaurateur hoping to make it big in the culinary world. The gameplay revolves around taking, preparing, and serving orders requested by your customers. How you manage your time in regards to all of these tasks is paramount to your success as a restaurant owner. With these tasks laid out, we can see that the time management required has several layers; how best you use all of your time in a given day, how best you split time between tending to customers and preparing food, and how best you use the time while food is cooking or resting to get other tasks done. These interwoven layers do an excellent job of keeping the game’s intensity high and the player, that’s you, engaged.

Delicious Tea Garden Delicious Vol 1

Delicious: Emily’s Tea Garden

Now for money management, Delicious’ money management focuses primarily on using money earned through service and tips to decorate the restaurant. This can be done by improving furniture, or decorating the walls and floors with various aesthetic items such as paintings or plants. These decorations tie directly into the final pillar of restaurant sims: happiness management.

Customers are fickle and impatient and keeping them happy is key to earning more tips, which in turn can be used to invest back into your restaurant to purchase more decorations. Other ways to keep customers happy while they wait involve managing the entertainer at the restaurant, moving them to the table with the most impatient guests to keep them in their seats until their food arrives. In Delicious, the entertainer role is instead served by chocolates, though the entertainer does debut in later entries.

Delicious Emily's Wonder Wedding

Delicious: Emily’s Wonder Wedding

Hopefully I’ve inspired you to take a crack at managing your own restaurant this Thanksgiving, serving up some digital delicacies to your many customers. If so, you can grab both Delicious Vol. 1 and Delicious Vol. 2 for 20% off through until tomorrow. And if this kind of game isn’t for you, don’t fret there are many other games you could try out available for our Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales, where you can save up to 30% on up to three games sitewide!

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2 thoughts on “This Thanksgiving, Try Managing Your Own Restaurant”

  1. Wow, happy Thanksgiving in a classic time management game! And not to mention, in game number five on I believe would be in the ideal PlayFirst collection (Diner Dash: Seasonal Snack Pack) has a Thanksgiving themed restaurant as its third restaurant (Hometown Harvest).

    All in all, I hope Legacy Games makes more Amazing Time Management collections for both download and CD.

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