Some of the most fun I've had playing a game this year came during a brief but overwhelming love affair with Overcooked. This frantic local co-op cooking game really captured the hearts of PC Gamer's US office—the minute the clock struck 5 pm we were crowding into a meeting room to chop tomatoes and wash dishes and plate our meals as the timer ticked down. Taking place in increasingly ludicrous restaurant scenarios, including a moving iceberg, a pirate ship and even the middle of a road, Overcooked requires careful concentration and coordination to fulfill specific orders in quick succession, but naturally everyone in the kitchen starts shouting at each other within just a few minutes. It might be even more fun to watch the madness unfold than to have a hand in it.

The most gratifying thing about Overcooked is rising to the challenge of a new level. The game seems easy, at first, with an introductory few levels that just introduce you to the basics of working together to prepare ingredients, cook them, and turn them in quickly. But as soon as obstacles start to show up, a poorly prepared team falls apart.

There's no single strategy that works in every kitchen, except perhaps having a team captain to Gordon Ramsay your chefs into ashamed organized obedience. Sometimes it's best for each player to focus on a specific task: you're on dishes, you're on chopping, you're on steaks. Don't. Burn. The. Steaks. You. Fuck. Got that process down? Good—now you have to toss aside that routine for something completely different.

Then the next level constricts your movement, requiring everyone to cycle through each task in one smooth, continuing motion. Suddenly it's a game about timing, not mastery of a particular activity. And things just escalate from there, requiring some creative planning and pinpoint execution to clear. Another level sets you skidding across a broken ice flow, where it's treacherously easy to drop a completed dish into the ocean. One late-game stage takes you to space (cool) but requires pinpoint timing to move ingredients and completed dishes back and forth between a moving airlock compartment (so hard). 

The first crack at the harder kitchens almost always collapses in indecision, yelling, and despair, but those are the natural stages of Overcooked grief. You take a deep breath. You admit that that was a disaster. And you regroup. Responding to that failure with a battle plan and executing on it for that sweet sweet three star reward? That's a bisque for the soul.

Like other great co-op games, Overcooked is mostly a tool used to form memorable experiences with your friends. It does a lot with simple controls and variation on a single concept, but it helps that everything is so cartoony and adorable. The characters are easy to differentiate from the overhead perspective thanks to a few fun standouts like a fox and a raccoon who uses a wheelchair (Evan's go-to). Even the simple story is great, involving time travel to save the world from a giant meatball called the Ever Peckish.

Overcooked is so much more intricately designed than you'd expect for a small co-op game about cooking. I wouldn't recommend it by your lonesome, but with a trio of friends, it's a phenomenal choice for an hour of co-op madness. You'll come out stronger for the effort, new bonds forged in a kitchen split asunder by an earthquake. Or you'll hate each other, but such is the risk of a friendship tested by overcooked soup.

Hot on the heels of its Lost Morsel DLC, Kitchen catastrophe simulator Overcooked will launch a free Christmas-themed expansion next week. 

Dubbed a "festive feast of holiday-themed extra content" Overcooked's Festive Seasoning DLC adds a range of goodies to the cooperative couch cook 'em up. There's a new winter-kissed world map, for example, which adds a snowmobile for easier/life threatening navigation. There's also two new unlockable chefs—the snowman and the reindeer—who can be adorned with Santa hats; and there's two new recipes for serving—the turkey dinner and the stew. 

A new Winter Lodge theme boasts eight new co-op levels; and, to top all of this off, the new expansion adds a new utensil: the flamethrower. As if fumbling around Overcooked's hazard-ridden kitchens wasn't dangerous enough. 

Here's the latest expansion in practice by way of moving pictures:

Overcooked's Festive Seasoning DLC will be available as a free download on December 6. Until then, here's Tom's review of the base game—which he described as "one of the most fun and challenging local co-op games ever made." Should it tickle your fancy, it's available to buy via the Humble Store for £12.99/$16.99. 

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Overcooked, the frantic co-op cooking game Tom described as "chaotic bliss", has launched its first portion of DLC.

Named The Lost Morsel, culinary serving sim's latest outing visits an "exotic" jungle setting and offers players six new chefs by way of a Dinosaur, Robot, French Bulldog, Panda, Bear and Pig; as well as six new campaign levels to spill soup and burn meals all over. Navigating the world map is also made possible this time by helicopter because a group of folk who can barely bring water to the boil without setting the room on fire can absolutely be trusted to pilot rotorcraft.

Here's a trailer:

The Lost Morsel DLC is out now and costs 3.99/$4.99, while the base game has a new Gourmet Edition which bundles it with the expansion for 15.99/$19.99.

Overcooked is available to buy via the Humble Store for 12.99/$16.99.

Some online stores give us a small cut if you buy something through one of our links. Read our affiliate policy for more info.

Perhaps the biggest challenge of Ghost Town Games and Team 17 s Overcooked is reaching the end of any given level without having set the kitchen on fire. I speak from experience, having watched pretty much every in-game kitchenscape I ve graced go up in flames a problem which others appear to have struggled with too. The best thing about it is this is part of the fun.

If you think you might fare better, you can now test your own culinary clout as Overcooked has launched on Steam, and celebrates with the following release trailer.

Across 28 standard campaign levels, as well as an end boss, players can whip up a storm either on their lonesome or via local co-op the latter of which Tom suggests best portrays what the chaotic kitchen em up has to offer. Best served with friends are Overcooked s nine local versus levels. Depending on how much you value your friendship, you can even split gamepad controls and share the same controller with a pal.

There s no online co-op for now, which is a shame, however there is the choice of 14 different chefs to play as, as well as a range of kitchen settings such as aboard spaceships and moving vehicles to flounder within. And inevitably set on fire.

Overcooked is out now via Steam for 12.99/$16.99/ 15.99.

There s fish burning in a fryer and I m too busy washing plates to stop it. Meanwhile, nobody is cutting potatoes and the paraplegic racoon in a wheelchair just slipped and fell into an icy river while holding a full plate of french fries ready to serve. The fryer goes up in flames and the tabby cat rushes for the extinguisher. We still need to cut potatoes.

This is a normal level of catastrophe in Overcooked, a wonderfully chaotic local co-op cooking game that gives real power to the words too many cooks spoil the broth. At its best, a team of four players look like a beautiful mix of a ballet and an assembly line. At its worst, they look like one of Gordon s Ramsay s nightmares. And either way it s an absolute blast to play.

Overcooked is a race against time as you and your team try to make and deliver as many dishes as possible in four minutes. Burgers, pizza, and other dishes all come together in a similar way: chop ingredients, cook ingredients, put cooked ingredients on a plate, and serve before time runs out. Simple enough, but very rarely that straightforward in practice.

Overcooked s controls are great because they are easy enough to pick up quickly, but also allow for lots of little tricks that aren t taught in the tutorial. You can bring each ingredient to a plate, or you can pick that plate up and use it to gather the ingredients directly, saving time. Ingredients can be placed on a level s limited counter space, or you can just throw them on the ground to be picked up later. Learning these things through playing was exciting because I could see myself actually getting better, not just being given new abilities or told how to do some new technique.

Occupational hazards

Where Overcooked really shines, and where the vast majority of its challenge comes from, is its level design. They start simple an outdoor kitchen with random people walking through your path, a pirate ship that tilts and moves your tables back and forth but quickly escalate until your kitchen is split across three moving trucks or on shifting islands in a lake of lava, testing your team s communication more than anything else. There are two ice river levels, mentioned above, and they re some of the hardest in the game, but they made me keep coming back for more, trying to get a three star rating.

Suddenly we were driving back across Overcooked s charming level-select map, tracking down and tryharding any levels we only had two stars on. It s easy to complete a level, as the one star requirement is generally low except for the final set of levels which ramps up dramatically. There s no way to fail entirely, which I actually disliked as it removed some of the pressure when time was about to run out on an order. But to get three stars for most levels requires a gameplan and a coordinated team. We would often pause a level right at the start just to plan our strategy and assign roles to each person. As I played with the same group of people more, we all fell into regular roles.

But the levels in Overcooked are specifically designed to throw this sort of planning into chaos, and inevitably things would fall apart. The game didn t want us to have a plan, it wanted us to think on our feet. What happens when the pirate ship tilts, the tables slide, and suddenly Evan and his raccoon don t have access to the burners anymore? It s being able to quickly communicate and swap roles that let us conquer some of the game s harder stages, and when our communication broke down it was utter chaos.

I always knew things had gone horribly wrong when everyone stopped talking. The silence was often deafening as orders went unfilled and people haphazardly bumped into each other. These trainwrecks are part of the experience, but there are some ways Overcooked could better support players during the chaos. For one, every character wears a white chef s hat, making it hard to find myself at a glance, and I wish hats matched each player s shirt color. Another issue is that thresholds can be a little ambiguous I sometimes fell through the cracks between platforms on the ice and lava levels.

Off-line cook

In addition to the cat and the racoon, there s still an elephant in the kitchen we need to talk about: Overcooked doesn t have online play. Plenty of fantastic games are local only TowerFall Ascension and Gang Beasts are prime examples of that but it s still disappointing. The experience of reorganizing on the fly (read: frantically yelling at each other) probably wouldn t be the same over VoIP, but I wish I at least had the option.

Overcooked just isn t as much fun alone. Playing solo, you control two chefs which you can swap between, and chopping ingredients takes a lot longer than while playing multiplayer. This let me start chopping an onion with one chef, swap to the other to start another task, then swap back when the chopping was done. Instead of being about adapting to the level and sharing tasks, Overcooked becomes more like StarCraft a game of micro and finding the optimal order to complete those tasks.

It s a harder game, and a significantly more frustrating one with no one but yourself to blame for mistakes, but it s actually easier to progress while playing alone. The less people you have, the fewer points you need to reach two or three stars. So while you can get more done with four people, I often found it easier to reach three stars on a level with only one or two players because the bar was set so much lower. It felt like a cheap trick in order to progress when I was stuck, but everything seems simpler when there are fewer cooks in the kitchen.

With four players gathered around, Overcooked is hands down one of the best couch party games ever made. It s the perfect balance of chaos that can be conquered with skill. With two or three players, the game gets a little easier and much more strategic, with room to see what your doing and think about what needs to be done. With one, it s all about challenging yourself, and a lot of the whimsical fun of shouting at the screen is lost.