One of the prevalent genres of indie games is the genre of wacky physics games, where simple tasks are made much harder because of their control scheme. Flash game sensation QWOP is one example, as well as the joke simulator game Surgeon Simulator. The genre is popular, partly because it’s challenging and partly because it’s funny to watch, making it easy YouTuber bait. My sister watches Game Grumps, and recently watched them play Brunch Club. Afterward, she wanted to play it with me, so we spent the past few days playing it in sessions. Just like my Super Mario Party review, I decided to make this into quality review content.

In Brunch Club, developed by Foggy Box Games and published by the Yogscast (yes that Yogscast), up to four players can cooperate to fulfill the simple task of cooking food. Each player has a cursor and can possess most objects to move it around in a slow, painful way, with the main goal of preparing food in these conditions.

There are five modes to the game: Practice Mode, Standard Mode, Face/Off, 5 Second Rule and Rice Ball Rumble. The first two are near identical, but the former doesn’t penalize you for dropping objects out of the play field, nor does it have special stage gimmicks. These two modes are essentially the main modes. Five of the stages have players preparing certain amounts of food while the other three have you preparing as much food as possible within a time limit.

played a game with my sister pic.twitter.com/KjthLQEXxM

— Dari (Evil Forme) (@scitydreamer) November 15, 2019

The challenges range from trying to hop a piece of bread into a toaster, while trying to finagle a knife to butter it; to creating ice cream delicacies before the scoops melt. It is pretty simple and for the most part works alright. There’s a jump button but it’s near useless, so you’re encouraged to use environmental objects to build staircases to climb up to things more easily. I will say that the standard mode is kind of annoying in that you’re forced to restart when one of these environmental objects falls off the stage, despite sometimes not being necessary to win.

Those main modes work just fine, but I’m more divided on the other ones. Face/Off is the local competitive mode where two players face off in a certain number of stages, either trying to clear the stage faster or preparing more food than the other within the time limit. The main issue of this mode is that you pretty much need an honor system in place to actually play, because there’s nothing stopping you from going into the other player’s playfield and messing with their stuff. When my sister and I realized this, quick matches ended up dragging on and it wasn’t very fun. There’s also this glitch in the competitive version of the sushi-making game where the box that dictates what ingredients you need sticks around as a white cube, even outside of the mode; which was annoying, to say the least.

Rice Ball Rumble is another local competitive game, but it’s just a bad version of that Mario Party minigame where you ram balls into each other. There’s no sense of impact to the action compared to the slow, prodding march of food in the main game. Additionally, the game often spawned us away from solid ground for cheap deaths and unearned wins. I honestly walked away from these modes feeling that they were half-baked additions. Maybe they work better in the Steam release? Who knows.

5 Second Rule is another cooperative mode, where the player is presented the challenge of bringing a piece of food through a number of checkpoints without letting it touch a bare surface for longer than a total of 5 seconds. I actually thought this was an interesting mode, because instead of trying to figure out how to cook food, you and your partners have to figure out how to build optimal bridges. My sister actually holds 6th place on Paranormal Snacktivity… which means nothing because you can’t actually view the leaderboards for the Halloween themed stages, for some reason. Still, it was a pretty okay mode.

You’ll exhaust the amount of new content pretty quickly. It’s one of those games where the main value is the replayability of trying to push for the best times and highest scores. Luckily, my sister is all about that stuff and while not exactly mind-blowing, the main modes work well enough and are fun just enough to keep us pushing for scores. Of course, you have to remember that multiplayer is local only, at least on the Switch. Its replay value kinda drops if you’re just pursuing scores on your lonesome, because you lack that added dimension of trying to coordinate with others, which makes it more engaging.

Brunch Club is an alright game that shines when you’re playing with other people; if you have anyone on hand. The actual competitive modes can stand to be better and seem to have more noticeable problems than the others, but if you like co-op stuff, it’s an okay time waster.

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Brunch Club

$14.49

6

Score

6.0/10

Pros

• Decent wacky physics.
• The drive of chasing high scores with your friends.

Cons

• Not for people that aren't into chasing scores
• Competitive modes very flawed
• Local only.