How Overcooked’s Kitchens Force You to Communicate

This summer, I have been playing a lot of Overcooked. This is a pair of games about working in a kitchen, and in each level you must fulfil orders by grabbing ingredients, chopping them up, cooking them, and delivering them to the restaurant. Which would be pretty easy, if only the restaurant wasn’t on a swaying pirate ship, or being split down the middle by an earthquake, or set on a hot air balloon… which, halfway through the stage, crashes into a restaurant so you’re now having to make sushi as well as salad.

It’s crazy. But, of course, the biggest challenge is simply getting two, three, or even four players to work together. Working as an organised team will require intense coordination and communication - unlike pretty much any co-op game I’ve ever played before. Because, playing games in co-op is always good fun. From old school run ’n’ gun games like Contra and Metal Slug, to modern day shooters like Gears of War and Halo, it’s a well established truism that any game is improved with the addition of a friend.

But most of these games so rarely ask you to truly communicate with your partner. This is often because the game is symmetrical - which means that the two players interact with the game in pretty much the exact same way. Take a game like Resident Evil 5, where there’s not a tremendous difference between playable protagonists Chris and Sheva. They both carry guns, can both beat up zombies, and can both carry the same gear.

And so because each character is equally capable, this can often lead to a situation where you feel like you’re just off playing your own games - and only infrequently joining forces to revive one another, or perform simple co-op actions like boosting one person over a ledge. This is very different to the more recently released Resident Evil Revelations 2, where co-op players control very different characters. In the first episode, one person picks Claire Redfield who is a typical Resi protagonist with access to all kinds of firearms.

The other player is stuck with Moira Burton, who is not able to use guns - but does carry a torch which is used to light up enemies and temporarily stun them. She can also finish off knocked down enemies with a crowbar. With this set-up, the two players are forced to work much more closely together as neither can really survive on their own. Claire needs Moira’s torch, and Moira needs Claire’s firepower. This massively increases the need for the two players to rely on one another, and creates the sort of coordination and communication that’s lacking in many co-op games.

If Revelations 2 shows how giving players different abilities leads to close coordination, then Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes proves that giving players different information can also power teamwork. In this game, one player looks at the screen and sees a ticking time bomb, covered in wires, buttons, keypads, and other weird gizmos. The other player has a printed manual of instructions for how to defuse the bomb. So player one has to describe the bomb.

Player two has to then read out instructions for how to defuse it. And player one has to listen closely, and follow those instructions. Literally the only way to play together is to communicate. And if you don’t… Asymmetric co-op doesn’t just force communication, but it’s also a great way of allowing players of different skill levels to play together. This is something Nintendo has been doing a lot lately with games like Super Mario Galaxy where one player controls Mario and basically just plays the game like usual - and another can join in with a much easier role as a floating cursor, picking up star bits and stunning enemies.

But while asymmetrical design can be great for co-op, it wouldn’t work for Overcooked because the game needs to automatically scale depending on whether you’re playing in a group of four, with a couple friends, with a pal, or even on your own. Plus, this is a game that attracts people of very different skill levels, so you need to be able to divvy up roles on a level by level basis - to make sure those who aren’t super familiar with games don’t have to perform tricky movements like dodging fireballs or navigating slippery platforms.

So in this game, all chefs have the exact same abilities, and the exact same information. And each player is perfectly capable of preparing and delivering a meal completely on their own - with the only communication being “I’ll make the burger, you do the pizza”. But that’s not how Overcooked ends up being played. Why? Well, in this case, it’s because of the level design. From the very first stage of Overcooked 1, we can see that the design of the kitchen, with this long island in the middle, makes it very tedious to get from the onions to the chopping station to the pot to the conveyer belt.

But with two players working together - passing onions across the table in the centre - the process is much, much faster. Pretty much every stage is built like this, and later exasperated by things like paths too narrow for more than one chef, and levels split into two by moving vehicles. And going faster is important, because the scoring system is all based on time. Meals need to be cooked quickly, or customers will leave and you’ll incur a penalty.

You’ll get big tips for delivering items more rapidly. And your final score is based on how many meals you delivered during the level’s tight time period. So, the level design and the needs of the scoring system quite quickly splits players into distinct, and asymmetric roles - in this kitchen, for example, one player might focus on chopping vegetables and preparing meat patties, while the other cooks the burgers, prepares them, and delivers them to the restaurant.

And this creates loads of communication at the start of the stage, where players decide who will do what, and puzzle out - together - the most efficient way to cook the required meals. After this, however, Overcooked could have suffered the main drawback of asymmetrical co-op: that you can fall into a predictable pattern. You have your role, and you stick to it, and in some games you don’t even need to communicate that much any more because you’re so used to a familiar set-up.

But that’s not what happens in Overcooked. Because no matter how well choreographed your kitchen is at the start of the level, it will have turned into a manic catastrophe by the end of the stage. Why does this always happen? Well, it’s because there are loads of clever bits of design that disrupt these comfortable patterns, and force you to keep switching roles. So one is the wait timers on food that’s cooking. A burger takes a few seconds to fry, so it’s a waste of time to stand around and wait - encouraging players to wander off, see if they can help elsewhere in the kitchen, and generally become a huge nuisance.

Wait too long and your burger will start to burn - causing other players to have to disrupt their task to come sort out your mess. Then there’s washing up. Which literally everyone hates, but I think it might also be the absolute key to the success of Overcooked. Because no one is the dedicated plate washer; it doesn’t have the nice, predictable rhythm of the other tasks; it only becomes a thing later in the level; and no one wants to do it.

Meaning that every time you run out of clean plates, the flow is disrupted, meals starts burning, and those comfortable roles get completely shaken up. And, of course, there’s the most obvious thing: disruptions in the levels themselves. Moving chopping stations, ingredients on conveyer belts, shifting kitchens, and nuisance rats break up patterns and destroy your best laid plans, forcing you to constantly talk through new set-ups.

So Overcooked gets to be an asymmetrical game, without asymmetry, because it uses things in the level design - like weird kitchen layouts, dirty plates, random fires, and burning burger patties - to force players to work together, and then constantly change their roles throughout the stage, leading to lots of great communication. In the best Overcooked kitchens, you’ll never stop talking to each other. And, if you ask me, that means it’s a hugely successful co-op game.

Hey, thanks for watching, and cheers to my Patrons for their support, and a special thank you to my girlfriend for helping me get the Overcooked footage in this video. There’s more to cooperative gaming that we can talk about in the future, like making choices together, encouraging good behaviour, solving puzzles, or adding a spicy competitive element. So watch this space - GMTK has historically been very single-player focused but I’d love to do more multiplayer stuff going forward.

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