It’s important to be clear at the beginning, Lost Recipes is not a game. Or at least, I bloody well hope not. 

When viewed as an “experience” instead of a “game”, this review can be quite positive, but make no mistake – If you are looking for a cooking game, move along. This is not that. Had the team at 6DOF Reviews decided to judge Lost Recipe against our gaming criteria, holding its merit against other offers within that genre, Schell Games’ latest creation would definitely not have fared well…

ORDERING OFF MENU

Lost Recipes is categorised in the Oculus Store as an ‘app’ yet described on its store page as a cooking game. Under its announcement trailer on the official Meta Quest YouTube channel, it’s described as a “cooking simulator” at the start of a paragraph that itself concludes by calling it a game. To say that its marketing is muddled is an understatement.

A reasonably brief time within the world of Lost Recipes reveals that what you actually have here is a virtual cooking experience, with a side of homage to oral tradition. Unlike a genuinely gamified cooking offering, Lost Recipes features neither the frantic energy of service nor the compulsions of score-chasing, both of which nest traditional cooking games firmly within the genre of Time Management games. 

Instead, Lost Recipes guides the player through several recipes in an authentic, interactive historical kitchen while picking up a few info-taining facts about the local culture along the way. It is thoughtfully delivered, and once you get past the disappointment of not being in a cooking game, really quite enjoyable to be a part of. 

Lost Recipes allows the player to serve dishes from three different kitchens from three cultures throughout history; Mayan, Chinese, and Greek. You will be greeted by an authentically voiced ghost in each kitchen. This ghost will verbally walk you through the steps needed to recreate favoured or culturally significant dishes. While there is also a visual aid, in the form of a floating cookbook, the actual experience seems centred around the art of verbally handing down things of cultural significance, such as recipes.

Listen carefully to your ghost and follow your instructions closely, and you pretty much can’t go wrong.

LET ME SEE THOSE TONGS

Lost Recipes is incredibly well produced. The core mechanics that allow you to bring your long-dead cuisine to life are absolutely excellent. The kitchen operates with an understated physics system that only seems impressive when past experiences have shown you how complex natural-seeming physics in a kitchen environment are to achieve. To players without that reference point, everything just moves as effortlessly as it should, and it’s all remarkably intuitive.

Chopping, grabbing, and pouring are detailed and accurate and allow the player to shed the usual cognitive load and just listen to the instructions and enjoy the process. Ironically, this refined delivery is also the most frustrating element of the Lost Recipes experience. It highlights that although this is not a game (it’s really NOT), it would be outstanding if it were.

The raw potential for a fast-paced, high-pressure game with these mechanics is stark. Calmly making someone’s dead grandma their favourite pork dish is lovely, but I was hoping to be in an ancient Chinese restaurant prepping and serving Dongpo Pork against the clock. Please Schell Games? PLEEEEEEAAASSE?

PRESENTATION IS EVERYTHING

Lost recipes is exactly as one would expect from a studio as accomplished as Schell Games. The visual style is bright and easy to interpret. The world occupies enough hyperbole to be accessible yet provides enough realism to make the experience land. The visual language, particularly across the ingredients, is convincing, and items move and interact as you would expect them to. The kitchen and environments seem authentic to the period and culture they represent. I am not a scholar in ancient cuisine, though, so take that with an appropriate pinch of salt, I guess.

The visual cues that indicate that a component is correctly prepared are easy to identify, making it easy to understand if you have achieved what is being asked. However, this is almost too efficient as following the glowing, golden indicators makes it very difficult to get anything wrong.

As with previous Schell Games offerings like the superb I Expect You To Die Games, the audio is exceptionally well delivered and forms an integral part of the experience. The ambient sounds and background music feel regionally appropriate and add to your sense of presence within the world. More importantly, they do very little to intrude on the player’s experience, focusing instead on the conversation between student and cooking instructor.

The voice acting is well directed, with voice actors indigenous to the regions they represent. Each performance is admirably directed to be easily understandable yet immediately recognisable as authentic to each region. The ghost voices brought a sense of genuine warmth to the kitchen, which I found both engaging and endearing.   

MAKE MINE A SUPERSIZE??

Whilst Lost Recipes does many things well, particularly when removed from the context and standards of a game, it lacks enough content to really achieve its broader aims. Developers Schell Games have indicated that they want Lost Recipes to be viewed as educational. However, they miss the mark somewhat and land in the realm of light infotainment. The anecdotal style of passing information to the player is natural and engaging, but there doesn’t seem to be enough depth in the imparted knowledge to truly call the experience educational. 

The other aim seems to be creating a calm, relaxing experience within which players can find small moments of zen. However, these moments are often too brief. Each cuisine/culture has only three dishes to prepare, most of which take around 6-7 minutes to prepare. There are indeed a few more robust dishes that will take about 15 minutes or so, but overall my experience indicates that a complete play-through would take no more than 1.5 – 2 hours. 

Each dish you prepare is graded on a five-star scale, but I found it easy to score four stars on every dish without much effort. With incredibly forgiving mechanics, a lack of distractions, a clear vis with a friendly ghost, and obvious visual cues, it’s almost impossible to make a mistake here. Unfortunately, this also suggests very little motivation to come back and try and improve on your first scores.

CHECK PLEASE

When viewed as an experience instead of a game, Lost Recipes is a quaintly charming offer, offering a relaxing and simple way to pass an hour or two. It provides the chance to feel enveloped within a warm and inviting historical context, albeit superficially.

But please, heed this warning. If you are looking for a fast-paced, fully developed, kitchen based time management game, then Lost Recipes will sorely disappoint.

KINGSPRAY GRAFFITI | NEWBIE vs EXPERTS

For this review, we’re changing things up a bit, as I’m lucky to know a community of excellent local graffiti artists who are masters of their craft, so we’re going to let a couple of them have their say on Kingspray Graffiti.  Ravesh D. and Lukas had never used VR before, so we had an hour before firing up Kingspray letting them get a feel for using the Quest, which more than impressed both of them. Once they’d both started to get their heads around it (and I initially had to promise them we’d come back to Superhot to get them to change to Kingspray), they gave this title some serious attention.

I’ll convey their individual thoughts on the title, and then offer my own notes and score by way of our ‘official’ review.

It’s the Feel

You have to get good and be good to get a good result. But the thing is I must have spent aw man, a lot of money on cans to get good. A lot of money. And that’s not having the other stuff too, like all the tips and the pearlescent sh!#. Hundreds of colours and finishes here, it’s @!#*ing crazy, though. I’m trying stuff on here that I have never tried out there. I can’t afford it! And you move around just like you’d expect. For me, it’s the feel. You forget you’re using the control things and just… It tricks you into thinking you’re using a can, and it acts just like it. Obviously, the shape of the can’s different, yeah, but I mean the feel is the same. And the menu sh!# isn’t complicated, it kind of acts like you’d expect. Obviously, in the real world, you wouldn’t have a million colours or whatever.

IT’S GONNA STAY @!#* ED UP

Ohhhh, the drips, man. It’s just what it should be like. And no undo thing. If you @!#* it up, its gonna stay @!#*ed up until you spray over it, I like that. If you’re starting out with graffiti, you going to get used to that real quick – because it’s costing you a lot of time and money. I wish I would have had this, man. You know, four years ago. It feels natural and real. It’s a bit @!#*ed up you can’t spray on some of the bits, like in the subway train bit. There’s some places the paint won’t take at all, like the computer is like, blanking you. So that’s weird. It reminds me of the fact I’m not actually doing it. But man this is @!#*ing crazy, I need one of these. I wish it did this thing where you could smell the cans, that paint smell as it comes out, though! That’s the only thing I would say is really missing.

THE ZONE

I mean I was saying to Rav, you run out of things to say because it’s real. You don’t think when you’re spraying ‘oh this is real, this is blowing my mind’. You just get into the zone with it. You forget you’re in there. I just concentrate on what I’m doing. It’s so awesome, I can’t say. I love that you can just walk around, you can pick a spot, and have at it, yeah? It’s so much freedom, and no-one’s gonna have a go at you for it. 

ALL YEAR IN THAT VIRTUAL THING

If it was me, if I was really picky, I’d say let me head out with a few cans. Just pick the cans you want from the shelves and head out then. So you’d be picking up the cans from your bag or the floor, you know the colours you had. That’s when it makes me feel I’m in the virtual world, the menu and the picking colours from a wheel. It’s like an app then, not the real world. But I get to use a hundred colours at once here. Makes me look better than I am. I normally do monochrome, black and white, two or three colours. It’s how I learned because it’s cheaper and it’s less to carry. But man, I could spend all year in that virtual thing, seriously, because you can just let your mind run free with it. All over.

TUNES AND VIBE

Did I say about the music? Oh man, I thought I was going to just slide on Spotify and use my own playlist or whatever, but Kingspray Graffiti has some tracks I never heard before that are @!#*ing A, and they aren’t even in a genre really or anything. Usually, when they do ‘street’ stuff like this you get some guy from EA, some office guy, sat in his office thinking ‘we’ll put some NWA on yeah?’ and that’s it, but this is all over the shop! It’s great, and I wasn’t expecting it. It’s so chill, the tunes and vibe of it, I wish it could be like that more often outside. 

KINGSPRAY GRAFFITI | DOC SAYS

I’m not a professional graffiti artist by any means, but I find Kingspray Graffiti every bit as wonderful as Lukas and Rav do. It’s a liberating and extremely well-executed title, with a huge amount of attention to detail. Everything feels convincing and slick, and there’s a pleasing array of environments to explore and spray away in. The graphics are very impressive, and the sound is acutely observed and immersive.

A special mention must be made of the soundtrack. There’s a lot of really excellent music on Kingspray Graffiti that suits the title perfectly, some of it entirely unexpected. It’s presented as different ‘radio’ stations, so there are different moods, all of which are surprisingly likeable and groovy. 

Editorial note: Sadly, the Scrcpy capture of the Kingspray Graffiti session with Rav and Lukas didn’t work out, but they have both agreed to record another and bring some graffiti artist friends along with them… So look for another 6DoF Kingspray feature soon!