Magical Delicacy

Magical Delicacy is a cooking metroidvania which you can easily lose yourself in. Like any good fantasy, it encourages exploration and it doesn’t punish you for your mistakes. With an intriguing story, you can really put yourself in Flora’s shoes as you learn about the Kingdom of Grat with her.

If you like being guided from one objective to the next while playing a game, Magical Delicacy is not for you. But if figuring things out for yourself, exploring a wonderfully designed pixelated world and cooking up some unique delicacies in the kitchen all sound good to you, there's so much to love here. It's a unique blend of crafting and metroidvania, and it works incredibly well.

Magical Delicacy is a game that requires patience, but once you find that, the story, art, and overall vibe are more than worth its price tag.

When a talking, clothed, toddler-sized frog was the first to greet me in the town of Grat in Magical Delicacy, I knew I was in for a wholesomely spooky adventure! Magical Delicacy is a fun combination of cooking, magic and platforming mechanics that sees you play as Flora, a young witch who grew up in a remote part of the world and is spreading her wings by moving to the scenic kingdom of Grat. Minutes into the game, Flora is appointed her own home and workspace to begin her journey of buildi...

If you love cozy management games and witchy tales, then Magical Delicacy might be for you. Explore a beautifully scenic pixelated harbor town and create magical dishes for its inhabitants. White Thorn Games presents an artistic Metroidvania game from Skaule.

Magical Delicacy has a strong set of accessibility options that can help gameplay progression, however. From platforming simplification to removal of quick-time events to even UI scaling and typeface changes, there’s a lot of options here that I really appreciate seeing as they’re not always common functions in games.

A wholesome pixel art platformer. Cook magical delicacies from a vast collection of ingredients in your own shop. Explore an unfamiliar town and deliver tasty treats to the townsfolk. Learn new ways to traverse, discover secrets, and experience a unique witchy world. PC version reviewed. Review copy provided by company for testing purposes.

A cosy 2D Metroidvania featuring witches and cookery, that looks delightful but suffers from numerous irritations in its interface and level design.

Closing Thoughts: While Magical Delicacy can deliver cozy vibes, it drops the magic ball on almost everything else. The platforming isn't fun, cooking doesn't feel satisfying, and the main gameplay loop boils down to doing fetch quests for NPCs just to get a few extra bits of story and a generic upgrade. Both the cooking and platforming sides work against each other, and everything lacks polish, especially the animations. It's a fundamentally flawed experience with a clashing visual identity, with a great soundtrack and pleasant story being the main saving graces.

I’m a bit on the fence with my verdict here for Magical Delicacy. I think if you can get past the platforming, it’s genuinely pretty enjoyable. I wasn’t able to, though. As such, I’d recommend Magical Delicacy for fans of cozy games that think they’ll be fine with the boring platforming and its knock-on effects. However, if that’s something you’re not fine with, I can’t recommend the game.

Take a few jumping puzzles from a 2D platformer, a pinch of progression from a Metroidvania, the story of a gorgeous indie title, lashings of pixel art, a dollop of relaxing tunes, mix well, and bake until you can see the personality rising out of it. If that sounds tempting, that’s Magical Delicacy for you.