If you’re a fan of cooking co-op games like Overcooked but have wanted additional gameplay mechanics and depth, you’re going to want to check out Pao Pao, an upcoming restaurant management game that also has elements of exploration, farming and fishing, quests, and developing friendships with townspeople (…Towns-animals?). We spent some time in the demo on Steam, and here are our first impressions.
In Pao Pao, you and up to three friends run your own restaurant, juggling cooking, plating, serving, cleaning, and picking what dishes you want to serve. If you have Overcooked experience, you’ll settle right into the cooking controls and management aspect. But there’s much more here than just a fun cooking co-op game, as Pao Pao quickly expands into a surprisingly rich world full of delightful interactions and additional depth.
When not managing the restaurant, you can explore the town, complete quests, chat with NPCs, and start gathering (or growing and catching) ingredients for your menu. You can fish, buy items from the market, or eventually grow your own produce.
Fishing took a bit of getting used to because the minigame required pressing certain keys, and the keys were sometimes trickily on the opposite side of the keyboard than the screen, but I like the self-sufficient procurement of restaurant ingredients instead of having to lose your profits by buying at the market. This leaves a lot of opportunity if you are playing with other players as not everyone will have to be doing the same thing, one of your teammates can focus on fishing, another on farming, etc.
My favorite part of the demo is how many charming interactions exist in the world. You can sit on the benches and take a bath in the spa, cars in the street stop for you, NPCs will stop and take photos of you, and you can interact with a variety of different objects. There are also a ton of other mini-games scattered throughout the world, including an actual arcade with playable games. It’s the kind of game where you constantly find joy in the little details, which is something I didn’t expect going in.
There’s way more to Pao Pao than I expected, and I found myself enjoying the exploration and questing aspects as much as the cooking. If you’re looking for a new co-op cooking game or even a cute animal life sim, Pao Pao is absolutely worth keeping an eye on.
I received a Steam key for this game in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.