Simmer Down

Simmer Down is a kitchen game that isn't about panic. No countdown on screen, no combo meter to chase: you're judged on how well you cook and how kindly you serve. Guests are patient (not endlessly), food burns if you forget it, and the evening ends when the last table leaves.

Take the order. Chop, sear, bake, plate. Carry it out yourself.

Local co-op, drop-in. Pick up a free controller mid-service, press a button, you're in.

Online. Host from the menu, or open the game you're already playing. Games on your local network show up on their own; anywhere else, send a short invite code.

Or alone. Everything plays solo, and the story chapters scale their tables to the number of cooks.

In free play, start with a small restaurant in town, or a bare plot by the beach, in a village, in the countryside or up the mountain. Order produce, buy furniture and new recipes on the back-office computer, then place everything yourself: lift a piece, turn it, set it down, draw a hedge in one stroke. Two services a day, a reputation to earn star by star, and the plot next door waiting to be bought.

More than twenty dishes, from radishes with butter to a chocolate fondant, from a tomato tart baked in its tin to skewers on a wood fire. Each one is a sequence of gestures (wash, chop, fill, bake, plate), never a button in a menu.

Alongside the restaurant runs a story campaign about a family of caterers, told through other people's big days: a birth in 1979, a school canteen in 1987, a family reunion in a Provençal farmhouse in 1991. Vincent cooks at every one of them. He's never really in the room.

It begins tonight, at two in the morning, in his little sister's apartment, with a bowl of soup.

Four story chapters · Free-play restaurant · 1 to 4 players, local and online · Keyboard or controller, with Xbox, PlayStation and Nintendo button prompts

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