Go! Go! GOTY! 2024: Magical Delicacy

• Game: Skaule's Magical Delicacy
• Release Month: July
• Started: 05/01
• Completed: N/A

Magical Delicacy is a combination explormer, of the traditional 2D variety with traversal upgrades and a map that slowly fills out as you continue to investigate, with that of a professional mercantile crafting game akin to Gust's Atelier franchise where you split most of your time between farming the ingredients you need and then returning to your workshop to turn them magically into meals and potions and other bespoke crafted goods for a mark-up in price. As the new witch in town, Flora, you're tasked with introducing yourself to the vertical city of Grat's population of humans, the cat-like Tilin, the frog-like Gaball, and the tall and imposing elfin Pine and making connections by providing them with what they ask for, then using the payments to help buy the deed to the property you're temporarily using and expanding the amount of floor space for additional kitchen utensils like an oven, a cauldron, or a preparation space with a chopping board. As with the games in the Atelier series, there's a distinct low-stress Disney/Ghibli-esque (well, one Ghibli movie in particular) vibe to the whole "being a witch who does deliveries" and to befit that atmosphere, it's an explormer with no combat and no real fail states: you might take damage or fall down a bottomless pit, but it won't make any obvious difference after you immediately respawn. The game slowly starts adding utilities like shortcuts and other conveniences after a few hours, but early on you have to rely on a lot of busywork to get the orders put together. There are no time limits for these orders, at least.

Honestly, this game can be kind of a pain in the ass. Collecting ingredients isn't as simple as going into a dungeon instance and coming back with your arms full of reagents and food like it is in Atelier: you can pull up a few regrowing weeds around town and spend the handfuls of loose change from breaking pots to buy necessities from shops like the herbalist or the bakery, but that's about it. Anything relating to upgrading your kitchen is going to cost way more and will almost certainly only come from supplying people with their requests once you have the right tools and ingredients to do so, for which the profit margins are fairly thin because of how tough it is to find and procure what you require. There's even a mode where you can sell stuff to people walking past your house like you're replete in meals and potions; unless something changes towards the late-game and ingredients are suddenly pouring out of a magical portal, every meal order is going to be preceded with a quick sweep around the map at the relevant vendors and spawn locations, with little left over for extra sales (though it can be fun to see what can be made cheaply and sold highly; it's often not worth the trouble though unless you messed up an order and need to clear your inventory a bit). Even something as basic as bread requires two ingredients from the baker's that stock in quantities of 4-8 between full day/night cycles (and yes, the day/night thing becomes super relevant for potions, finding certain NPCs, and plant pulling, and I've yet to find a way to fast-forward to nighttime). You do end up becoming very familiar with where everything is at least, almost to the point where you don't even need a map (one is supplied, but like in Hollow Knight you have to find the wandering NPC cartographer first and also buy all the convenient map tech like markers and the compass that points to your own location, which even uses up one of your valuable limited equipment slots: who the hell played Hollow Knight and thought its map tech was the thing to take away from the experience?).

Still, maybe it's for the best that everything takes effort, or else the game's challenge curve will be next to nothing. As stated, the game doesn't do combat or fail states and while the catacomb areas offer some moderately tough platforming challenges it won't take long to complete them all with infinite respawns. That's also for the best though: it's not trying to be something so punitive, and as there's no rush to complete orders and everything (including money) respawns relatively quickly it means you'll never get stuck in a scenario with no cash and no ingredients with which to earn it. It's also annoyingly fond of having you figure out recipes on your own through trial and error, substituting ingredients with others of the same basic type (fruits or vegetables, for examples) but a different flavor profile because someone requested an "earthy" fruit pie instead of a sweet or sour one. Hard not to just toss it in the dirt and then hand it back to them with a smile on my face upon hearing a request like that. Best of all, substitutions might not always work and so you'll end up wasting rare ingredients that you may have spent thirty minutes jumping around an explormer map to track down and/or half the money you had on you to buy them.

Sadly, though I wanted to keep hacking away at its quests slowly but surely through pure obstinacy, the game is very buggy on the PC Xbox launcher. Whenever I quit the game I'm then asked to reinstall it from scratch each time: since it's only 1GB it's not a huge wait but it eventually grew aggravating enough (and potentially suggests there might be a whole bunch of other things wrong with it) that I eventually lost all patience, which was already being sorely tested by the game's glacial pace to begin with. In fact, this error-prone nature has been the case for both the Game Pass games I've played so far this month: Tchia, my 401st Indie Game of the Week, had bugged achievements that apparently aren't an issue in any other version of the game, but because Microsoft apparently treats PC Game Pass as an afterthought its Tchia (and many other games, I'd assume) is several versions behind and still has issues that have long been fixed on Steam and elsewhere. It's reminding me why I don't usually hit Game Pass up too often despite the generous selection of games: MS is seriously flaking on the thing, possibly because it's already costing them too much money. I guess as long as COD is functional the rest don't matter so much.

I'll hit you with a post-script on here if anything changes, but since I'm running down the clock on this free month I'd prefer to move onto the few other remaining 2024 games on there.

Current GOTY

1. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
2. Nine Sols
3. Dungeons of Hinterberg
4. The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom
5. Another Crab's Treasure
6. Pepper Grinder
7. Little Kitty, Big City
8. Still Wakes the Deep
9. Botany Manor
10. Magical Delicacy
11. Turnip Boy Robs a Bank
12. Doronko Wanko

< Back to Go! Go! GOTY! 2024