For games with similar concepts, see Diner Dash and Overcooked!.
Provides examples of:
- And Your Reward Is Clothes: Some of the bonuses awarded after you finish a stage allow you to make changes to your restaurant's interior, such as putting down new flooring and wall decorations and adding plants in the dining room. These affect the game in various ways, such as decreasing the amount of mess made by customers and affecting the customers' patience.
- Audience Participation: Players who are livestreaming the game on Twitch can have people in their chats use a command to enter the game and be served in the restaurant, as well as placing specific food orders.
- An Entrepreneur Is You: The player(s) "own" the restaurant and have to take care of all aspects of its operation, such as adding and upgrading equipment, incorporating new dishes, taking orders and serving food, and cleaning up dirty dishes and offal from meal prep.
- Character Customization: Players can pick a color, a uniform (red vest with bow tie, white apron, or white jacket), and one of many hats for their character.
- Game Over: If any customer's patience meter completely exhausts at any point, you instantly lose the game, with the screen showing that your restaurant has been forced to close.
- Geo Effects: Customers make messes on the floor as they eat. These come in three sizes and can pile up on each other to get larger, with each larger size impeding your movement more as try to walk over it. The mop can instantly remove them as you run it over them, the scrubbing brush helps clean them faster, kitchen floor protectors and rugs will keep them off the spots they're put down, and if you're running with Formal dining, once you get it maxed out they will no longer appear.
- Inconveniently-Placed Conveyor Belt: Conveyor belts are among the equipment you can buy and place in the restaurant. Wise players usually place them so they make gameplay easier. However, there is an achievement for conveying an item back to where it started.
- Lampshade Hanging: A few items humorously point out video game elements and common player behaviors that would be questionable in real life. For example, the Scrubbing Brush (clean floor messes faster and wash dishes faster) has a description reading, "Wipe the floor, scrub the dishes, don't think about it too much".
- Level Scaling: As you go further in the game, you have to serve increasing numbers of customers, the customers' patience timers can decrease, and there can be complications with cooking and serving such as customers ordering multi-part dishes and changing their minds about what they want after their order is taken.
- Made of Incendium: Food and appliances catch fire more easily than in real life — merely putting food scraps in an oven (for example) can immediately start a fire. Kitchen fires spread quickly if not extinguished.
- Oven Logic: The description for the Danger Hob references the error of believing degrees is proportional to temperature:10 minutes at 180 degrees... so 30 seconds at 3600 degrees?
- Overhead Interaction Indicator:
- Customers will have a green meter overhead representing their patience for each stage of the process of their stay (waiting to get into the restaurant, have their order taken, and get their food respectively) that gradually decreases. When it's critically low, the empty space in the meter will start flashing red.
- Food which is cooking will have a similar meter over the appliance, which will pop up an exclamation point when it's done. In some cases, such as a stove or microwave, if you leave the food cooking for too long, the bar will turn red to show that it's about to burn.
- Pun: The default names for your restaurant are puns on the main dish, such as "New Leaf" and "Unbe-leaf-able" for a restaurant serving salad and "High Steaks" and "Nice to Meat You" for a restaurant serving steak.
- Roguelike: The game incorporates several elements of roguelike gameplay:
- No Save Scumming—you can save the game, but it will just start you back up at the day in the game's progress that you last reached, and losing or abandoning the game will end your run.
- Getting through days earns you perks such as increased move speed, increased customer patience, and better equipment. However, in many cases you will have to choose which of these you actually get to use and discard the rest.
- When each day starts up, you get a number of random items such as additional dining tables, research tables, new/better cooking equipment, and extra plates.
- Choosing which items to keep and which to discard, and which gameplay condition to go with each time you earn a star, is essential to successful gameplay.
- Shout-Out: The "This Is Fine" achievement, earned by completing a day when the restaurant has been on fire for 15 seconds, is a reference to the "On Fire" strip from Gunshow.
- Teleportation: Once you progress far enough in the game, you'll earn the ability to set up teleporters. When combined with conveyor belts, these can allow you to have food prep setups spread out through the restaurant and instantly pop the finished ingredients or dishes out in a more convenient location to pick them up, or put a similar setup in place to send your dirty dishes to a sink for cleaning.
