A large number of games described as cooking games contain no preparation at all. This is not a complaint about them — several are very good — but it is a problem for anyone trying to find a kitchen, and it is worth naming the categories.
Launchers
You build a burger and then fire it across a map for distance. The build is real, takes about a minute, and exists to determine the projectile’s weight. Everything after that is an arcade game with upgrades. Two of these sit in this catalogue and both pages say plainly what they are.
Puzzles with food pieces
Matching games where the tiles are sushi, sliding puzzles where the blocks are burger ingredients, physics games where the objects are popcorn kernels. The food is artwork. These are usually filed under cooking because of what they are made of, and the giveaway is that nothing in them is ever combined, heated or served.
Idle factories
Production lines that run without you, where the play is deciding which machine to upgrade next. A chocolate factory of this kind is a legitimate and often well-made strategy game, but nobody is making chocolate — the first thirty seconds are manual and everything after is spreadsheet arithmetic in a nice coat.
Dress-up games with a kitchen scene
The most common hybrid, and the one that catches people out. A short recipe leads into a wardrobe that takes longer than the food did. There is nothing wrong with either half; the issue is only that the game is filed and titled as though the kitchen were the point.
What this site does about it
All four kinds are listed here, because a good game should not be excluded for being mislabelled by its genre. What we do instead is say so on the page. If the description tells you a title is a distance game wearing an apron, or that the dress-up scene arrives after two minutes of preparation, you can decide before you click rather than after.
Machine-readable data cannot make this distinction — nothing in a game’s category tags separates a kitchen from a puzzle with food in it. Somebody has to play the game and write it down.
