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 building up her small witchy cooking business and exploring the town for ingredients and customers.

The game makes it very clear early on that to find your way in Magical Delicacy you need to be continuously exploring the world. The town is accessible via side-scrolling mechanics, but as Grat is a town with areas that are high above and low under the ground, platforming mechanics also play a big part in exploring. Once you receive your map from the town’s cartographer, you’ll notice that it is made up of shops, townspeople generally hanging out and hidden secrets/areas that require special skills and potions to uncover.

Grat’s inhabitants will ask you for certain recipes to be cooked that specifically ask for ingredients to be included or excluded. All these treats are made in your shop/home; you begin with just a stove and chopping board, but will be able to purchase further appliances from the resident blacksmith, Star, as you progress. Once you purchase an item, your shop can be edited and it can be placed where you think it will flow best in your kitchen. These appliances range from mortar and pestle to juicers and at some point, a cauldron, which specifically produces witchy potions. Ingredients can be found either out in the world (where you can pluck glowing plants as you randomly encounter them), by growing them yourself in your garden, or by buying them from one of the many stores.

The edible plants of the game are placed in categories sorted by flavour, rarity, and how they can be prepared. Flavour-wise, plants have taste profiles such as creamy, savoury, salty and sweet, whilst rarity can be common, exotic or rare. Preparation includes juicing, roasting, dicing, etc. Each plant comes with a set of cute icons that describe its properties and whether it may be the right ingredient to include based on the criteria given by the customer.

When a townsperson/customer asks you to make them something, you have the opportunity to accept or deny their order. Being the type to always bite off more than I can chew (both in-game and in real life), I always accepted each request, even though you don’t know exactly what the recipe entails until you agree to make it. The order will then appear in your compendium, which will also include what the customer wants the taste profile of the dish to be. So the game may ask you to include things like roasted items, but avoid desserts. This system worked well, until it didn’t. There was one customer who wanted a “creamy” noodle dish and even though I tried combining the ingredients with a plant that had the taste profile of “creamy”, when the dish was prepared it did not tick the “creamy” box for my delivery requirements. The game really does need to provide some extra direction in regard to flavour profiles. Luckily for me, this order wasn’t one that would trigger progression in the game, which a number of recipes do.

Cooking the ingredients is fun to watch as Flora uses magic to roast, boil and brew her recipes. The world has a SNES pixelated feel which makes each character look super duper wholesome and cute. The baker constantly has a sack of flour hoisted over their back and the cheeky princess of Grat is always balancing off the edge of a platform. These inclusions give the player that little bit of extra information about some of the character’s personalities, though you can always have a chat with them if you want to get to know them better. The music, which I would describe as uplifting, has a calming 90s vibe reminiscent of soundtracks from old 90s family movies. These tunes sprinkle a bit more magic and nostalgia over the already charming experience of playing Magical Delicacy.

With most townsfolk you can talk, ask, and deliver, the latter used when presenting your cooking to them. An impressive inclusion was presenting the character’s pronouns in their compendium entry. Magical Delicacy has a number of accessibility options as well that make the game not only queer-friendly but also accessible to those who may struggle with the platforming and reaction minigames that are found within. Magical Delicacy presents the accessibility screen before you start the game, which covers making platforming easier, the ability to change font and the ability to scale the brightness of the background during night and day modes.

The game works on a 24-hour system with a day and night cycle. The presence of night reveals platforms that weren’t there during the day, meaning there is an opportunity for further exploration when the world is experiencing night. These platforms usually appear to lead you further up into the skies, whereas other platforms lead you down into dungeons, places where your platforming and reaction times are put to the test.

Navigating the world is super easy, however, a few times I was told to meet someone somewhere with a very vague description of where that area was and got lost. For example, I was told to meet someone “at the river church.” I was told by my housemate that it was “to the east” so I kept on exploring the east side of the map but just found myself going around in circles. These navigation issues could be fixed by expanding on the game’s compendium or by letting the player have a bit more guidance if they want/need. Continuously looping around the world map became boring at times, which is disappointing. Up until I encountered these issues, Grat had been an exciting town to explore and get acquainted with.