A third of my Indie Game of the Week itinerary are "huh, what is this?" impulse buys, a third are leftover bundle inclusions I naturally seem to accrue like a rock gathers moss (unless it's rolling, of course), and the third are purchases I attribute to the knowledgeable vox populi of this very site. Battle Chef Brigade, a game all about cooking monsters, was rated very highly by the Giant Bomb community (including Ben Pack, who placed it 7th in his GOTY list) in the already competitive year of 2017. For whatever I reason, I was laboring under the illusion that it was another Valkyrie Profile-inspired action-RPG from screenshots (there's been a number of those lately, not that I'm complaining): it is, in fact, a brawler with relatively little RPG seasoning that instead uses a fusion of match-three puzzle gameplay to complete a richly versatile flavor profile. (Sorry for the terminology; this always seems to happen with cookery shows.)

The titular Battle Chef Brigade is a royal unit of warrior chefs who not only keep the peace by fighting off the ever-present hordes of monsters everywhere, but turns their meat and other by-products into delicious meals for all to enjoy. The brawler part has you hunting these monsters down with a selection of battle skills and spells, collecting their spoils, and carting them back to the kitchen pantry. With enough ingredients, the player can then drop them one at a time into a skillet and juggle around the various colored gems to maximize the "score" of the resulting meal. As most of the game revolves an Iron Chef style contest, both halves of this process are strictly timed, with the player shrewdly rationing their time between gathering ingredients and cooking up the meal, and it only becomes more chaotic when the game introduces multiple judges to appease, and thus multiple meals to create. You're able to prepare for these contests, somewhat, with a selection of equippable items: some assist with the hunting (e.g. new techniques, more health or mana), ingredient usage (e.g. sauces, which change the elemental composition of the meal), and the cooking itself (e.g. different pans and cookware, including slow cookers where you can leave meals to improve gradually on their own while you go out hunting). There's a wide variety of items to suit any approach, including those that reward bonus score by completing extra objectives, or maybe if you crash and burn on one challenge you can re-enter with equipment that improves your odds on the next attempt (say, a fire-element focused meal challenge would benefit a lot from bringing in fire-element focused gear).

The cookery contests are also wisely broken up with some smaller challenges, framed here as temp work that Mina performs to afford new tools and ingredients for her future bouts. These include two jobs that focus purely on the match-three puzzle aspect: one has the "puzzle" mode sometimes found in games of the block-matching genre, where you need to reach the target goal with a fixed arrangement of gems and moves and must carefully suss out the correct path to take, and the other has you complete a series of gem arrangements as quickly as possible in succession. The third focuses on the combat instead, teaching you your character's techniques and how best to take down tough or maneuverable foes. They all serve to improve your skills for the competition, but feel distinct enough that they also provide a small reprieve between the high-stress chef showdowns.

I also want to mention the game's remarkable presentation. In addition to being one of the most wholesome games I've played - your protagonist Mina Han is in direct competition with a number of talented chefs from all over this vaguely fantasy world, almost all of whom she befriends immediately despite the stakes (and steaks) - the anime-styled art direction and hand-drawn graphics are uniformly excellent, with some catchy and suitably epic (for a cooking contest, at least) music throughout. The story takes some unexpected detours also, slowly building up a potential catastrophe in the backdrop of the competition and everyone's involvement in trying to fix the issue. It's a mature form of storytelling in the more egalitarian sense of a group of smart, empathetic people working together to calmly and scientifically address a problem, making the occasional missteps along the way and sparking relatable conflicts. I was definitely expecting something a lot sillier and broader given the premise, though there's plenty of levity throughout (an overly sensitive orc patisserie chef, for instance, or a girl who is followed everywhere by her teapot mech).

Like any good meal, Battle Chef Brigade is a lot more than the sum of its many ingredients; an attractive and compelling hybrid of two disparate genres framed with the fast-paced anxiety and mouth-watering culinary expertise of an Iron Chef cookery contest, and many little features and mechanics that serve that central conceit. It definitely feels like they started with the concept and worked backwards, but still pulled it off adroitly. Yet another delicious morsel hidden in the massive feast of quality titles that 2017 brought to our collective tables.

Rating: 5 out of 5.

Nice write up. This game is really unique and I found it super satisfying, without over staying it's welcome. I want to give a shout-out to the local multiplayer as well. You have the three characters, each who have different combat skills and special powers for collecting ingredients, as well as a variety of different recipes that they make depending on what starting ingredient they use. On top of that, there's variability in the cooking equipment, player trinkets and specialty cooking items, which you get to pick a loadout of at the start of each competition. Some interesting strategies in there for sure. The combat feels alright-ish, the levels are pretty small and easily learned, the puzzle cooking element is intriguing. Everything combined together makes for a pretty tasty game. Warning though, it will make you hungry.