Omelet You Cook Preview

If there’s anything I’ve learned in my time with Omelet You Cook's Early Access build, it’s that you can combine nearly anything on your eggy canvas — chocolate bars, baked potatoes, cheese, charcoal, chicken legs, and, of course, coconuts. If I wouldn’t eat it in real life, chances are that said omelet is going to earn me a good spot on the leaderboards. Take my latest masterpiece, for instance, which had two pieces of seaweed, four sardines, two tomatoes, and exactly one banana (with the peel), earning 122 points at the end of the round, and most importantly, a happy customer.

As a cooking roguelike, Omelet You Cook feels like you’re playing Slay the Spire in a chef’s hat, curating your pantry of ingredients much like you’d build your deck and choosing relics (called Helpers) to give you an extra edge. The premise has you working in a school cafeteria, which sends quirky students and faculty your way until you reach the final omelet inspection, at which point Principal Clucker will inhale your eggcellent or berry bad creations, roasting your cooking skills in the process.

Omelet building is as easy or chaotic as you’d like it to be. In the beginning, you’ll only have access to the Green Apron, which consists of six rounds and 0% conveyor speed, meaning it’s the easiest of the bunch. If you succeed and win Principal Clucker over, you’ll unlock the next Aprons, including Yellow, Blue, and Red, increasing the challenge with multiple rounds and fast ingredients whipping by you. The hardest of them all is the Black Apron, but it’s still in development!

Your starter pantry, which is chosen alongside your difficulty level, determines what items you’ll have in your first round. Currently, there are six options: Bell Pepper Bacon, Veggie Lover, Sausage Spinach, Scoochie Special, and Tin Can Trasher. All have pros and cons, but so far, I’ve found Trasher to be the most difficult, as it gives you six Tin Cans, which subtract 20 points every time you use one.

Your goal is to mix and match ingredients, meeting or exceeding the target score that your omelet needs to be worth. Since each item has unique properties, such as “plus two points when touching meat” or “plus three points per Soft ingredient overlapping this”, you do need to do some maths and planning to make sure you’ll have enough points at the end! Additionally, customers will often have traits (veggie fiends, ingredient thieves, and more) that impact your strategy, so you’ll need to be versatile. Completing optional tasks adds more difficulty as well, challenging you to score 20 points over your target or using at least five different food items, for example.

Now, let’s talk cooking. Every time your conveyor belt brings you ingredients throughout a round, you have to select one and drag it onto the omelet; what you don’t choose is discarded. You do have a limited amount of Dispenses per round, which is how many times you get to put something onto your omelet (or off to the side if the customer requests).

Early on, you don’t have to worry about ingredient placement too much, but as you progress, you’ll encounter customers who deduct money or points if you put something too close to the edge, or they’ll prevent you from picking up an ingredient once it’s set. On the other hand, sometimes you’ll have a lot of chaotic movement with a rotating eggy foundation or food that moves, pushing other items in the process, which is especially fun.

In between each round, you’ll visit Pecks-a-Lot’s shop. This is a chance to use the money you earned to expand your pantry. Ingredients can have many labels, but they usually fall into a broader category, such as Vegetables, Meat, Root, Sweet, and Dairy, and you can buy crates of them at this shop. You won’t know what individual items a crate has until you purchase it, but there’s usually something there that can give your pantry an extra punch. Additionally, crates often come with an extra Dispense, so you get more opportunities to put ingredients onto your omelet, and as such, you increase your chance at gaining more points!

Don’t sleep on Helpers, though, which are also on sale at Pecks-a-Lot. These give you passives that can be quite useful. The Ring of Clutchness, for example, increases your final adjustment time between the last Dispense and point calculation, giving you an extra five seconds to make sure your ingredients are all touching (or are separated) in optimal ways. Others reward certain combos of food; take the Root & Fruit Finesser, for instance, which adds a point to each Root per Fruit you’ve used.

The best way I’ve found to take your eggy creations to the next level is by utilising the over/underlapping feature, as some items give you a lot of points if they have multiple ingredients put above them. However, this can be a bit difficult to get the hang of control-wise at first, as there’s currently no way to select whether you’re putting an ingredient on top of or below another item. After looking at the Steam forums, though, it appears the devs are considering using the mouse wheel to implement selection cycling when your mouse is over multiple ingredients.

I can’t close out this preview without dedicating a paragraph to the delightfully intimidating Principal Clucker. As much as he judges your ingredient choices, he does want you to succeed! If you happen to go overboard on an item, and I do it so much, he’ll offer you a legendary ingredient that might pop up for sale at Pecks-a-Lot. During one run, I managed to use over 60 points of Anchovies, and Clucker decided to grant me Sardines!

What I loved about Omelet You Cook is that no run felt the same. The randomised crates and Helpers at the merchant give you many opportunities to switch up your strategy, and the customers themselves have distinct tastes that keep you on your toes. The varied feel makes sense when you look at how much the game already has during Early Access, including over 25 ingredients, 15 traits, and 30 relics. The recent Zesty update even added lemons, limes, oranges, and two new customers!

During Early Access, Omelet You Cook will receive a true ending, more difficulties, and more content. Check out the game now on Steam if you’d like to put on your chef’s hat and face Principal Clucker!