Simmer Down

Simmer Down is a cooking game with no countdown. Every guest pays for their plate, leaves a tip if they go home happy, and raises (or lowers) your restaurant's reputation. They're patient, but not forever, and a dish left on the stove burns. The service ends when the last table has left.

You take the order, you cook, and you carry the plate to the table yourself.

Together on one screen. Plug in a controller mid-service and press a button: one more cook joins the kitchen.

Online. Invite your Steam friends into your game, or join theirs from your friends list. On the same network, games show up on their own; otherwise, a short invite code is enough. Remote Play Together is supported.

Solo. The whole game plays solo; in the story, the number of guests adapts to the number of cooks.

Two ways to run a restaurant. In Career, you take over Le Petit Comptoir, which Lucienne ran for forty years; she stays around to give you advice. You grow it step by step: new recipes, new equipment, staff, then a direction to choose (fast food, classic or fine dining) and more restaurants on the map. In Free Play, everything is open from the start: pick a plot (in town, by the sea, in a village, in the countryside or in the mountains) and build whatever you like.

Either way, you lay out everything yourself: walls, floors, worktops, ovens, tables, plants. Two services a day, lunch and dinner.

More than twenty dishes, from radishes with butter to chocolate fondant, from fries to beef Wellington. Each one is made the way it is in a real kitchen: you wash and chop the vegetables, fill the tart in its tin, put it in the oven, watch it cook, then plate it. You buy recipes one by one and build your own menu.

Alongside the restaurant, a four-chapter campaign tells the story of a family of caterers: Vincent, a cook, and his little sister Mia. It begins tonight, at two in the morning: Mia is ill, and Vincent makes her their mother's soup. Then come the memories: in 1979, the family buffet that celebrates Mia's birth; in 1987, her school canteen, on her birthday; in 1991, a family reunion in a farmhouse in Provence. Each time, Vincent is in the kitchen, and you're the one cooking.

A four-chapter campaign · A twelve-stage career and Free Play · 1 to 4 players, local and online · Keyboard or controller (Xbox, PlayStation and Nintendo prompts)

Trailer music: piano from the Salamander Grand Piano by Alexander Holm (CC BY 3.0).