I’ve been playing a bit of the recent Godlike Burger, which is a restaurant management game where you run a burger joint in space. You also have to harvest your own meat by murdering your customers (hopefully after they’ve paid you).
I do recommend it if you enjoy management games and you have a sadistic streak (or if you enjoy dark humor). It’s a lot of fun.
However, I made some mistakes early in my game time, and I got incredibly frustrated with the game’s appliance breakdown mechanic. See, your appliances just break down all the freaking time, which can throw off a really good gameplay rhythm. It would be like showing your friends a juggling trick, then having a clown come up to you and punch you in the face in the middle of it. No, I’ve never been in that exact situation myself, but you can see how frustrating it might be…
I don’t have a solution for the clown problem, but I do have one for the Godlike Burger appliance problem. You can solve this pretty easily by going to the PC in the character’s main office (where you order your supplies) and upgrading the “Assurance” stat. There are only two upgrade levels, they’re both relatively cheap, and the second one removes appliance wear and tear permanently.
So why did I get so frustrated with this game mechanic? Well, hear me out for a minute.
I honestly didn’t know this was a thing at first. When I played through the game’s tutorial, I hit a wall early on. There’s a part in the tutorial that shows you how to adjust the gameplay speed, and the whole thing just got stuck there for me. No matter how fast or slow I adjusted the speed, my restaurant would just sit there idling. So I chose the option to skip the rest of the tutorial and begin my first in-game day.
I did look around various menus and upgrade paths, but when I spotted the “Assurance” option, which has a badge icon, I thought it had something to do with the police and I skipped past it. To be clear, it was mostly my fault for not reading the flavor text. On the other hand, if I were designing this menu (I used to design website menus for a living), I would have used a wrench icon and called this something like “Maintenance.”
Anyway, I was finally about five hours into the game before I discovered this little trick. If you want to walk a mile in my shoes, try playing Godlike Burger for five hours without purchasing the “Assurance” upgrades. Just tell me how long it is before you’re pulling out your hair.
To make matters worse, when I finally purchased the upgrades, my game crashed, so I had to fire it up again. Instead of hitting the “Continue” button on the main menu, I accidentally hit “New Game.” That meant that my progress was entirely wiped.
Now, you can absolutely make the argument that I should have not started a new game. There is a popup that asks you if you really want to do this. But in my clumsiness, I clicked “Yes” instead of “No.” And that is on me entirely. That’s not the fault of Godlike Burger, the developers of Godlike Burger, or anyone who plays Godlike Burger (well, besides me, because I do play Godlike Burger). It’s my fault.
But you can also see how frustrating this might be, and how it might lead someone to frantically write an article about how they were upset about it, even if that article needed to be toned down later.
So yes, dear readers, I was a bit too harsh in my criticism of Godlike Burger. My complaints were basically because I was having a bad day, and not because the game did anything wrong. I just hope that the Godlike Burger-loving crowd finds it in their hearts to empathize with my plight, and maybe even forgive this tired old game reviewer for his egregious sins.
Disclaimer: I received a review code for Godlike Burger on Steam, but the opinions expressed in this article are my own.
