Our Verdict
Magical Delicacy brews up the perfect mixture of Metroidvania exploration, cozy game farming, and narrative intrigue to keep you hooked. You’ll easily spend hours helping Flora in her quest and enjoy every second of it.
When I heard that developer skaule and cozy games publisher Whitethorn Games were releasing Magical Delicacy, a witchy cooking game with Metroidvania exploration and no combat, it immediately hit my wishlist. Why? Because even though I love exploration and untangling secrets, I’m admittedly not the most skilled at combat-heavy titles. Spoiler alert: I’m so glad I heard about this game because I cannot get it off my mind.
Magical Delicacy follows Flora, a young witch looking to make her way in the world. She moves to the cliffside town of Grat as it has a reputation for housing more witches than her hometown and opens a small kitchen called Flora’s Magical Delicacies. The aim of the game is to expand your magical cooking knowledge and skills by fulfilling requests from the townsfolk, but you quickly get embroiled in a decades-old conflict between humans, witch covens, dragons, and unicorns.
As is standard for Whitethorn Games’ titles, Magical Delicacy has incredible accessibility options, making it even more approachable for Metroidvania newbies like myself. You can make the platforming easier and disable quick time events, as well as change the font style and size, dim the background, and outline Flora for higher visual contrast. I always look out for comprehensive accessibility menus in games, and Magical Delicacy ticks that box immediately.
The most apparent feature of this game is that its gameplay loop is beyond satisfying. Similarly to other games like Stardew Valley or even Cult of the Lamb, you spend your time exploring, foraging ingredients, meeting new people, growing crops, and experimenting in the kitchen. However, Magical Delicacy doesn’t require you to sleep – in fact, it encourages exploration at all times of the day, as some platforms only reveal themselves in the moonlight.
In my experience with farming games, it can be frustrating being forced to sleep, especially when I’m in the groove of an adventure in the wilderness. Leaving this aspect to the side is one Magical Delicacy’s biggest strengths, especially as it lets me observe how the environments change from day to night and how that affects my traversal of the world. There is a negative side to this freedom though, as it means the game isn’t punctuated with natural stopping points.
As I continued to fall deeper in love with Magical Delicacy, it meant I found it incredibly difficult to put down. So, the lack of stopping points can lead to me hyper-fixating on the game for entirely too long and forgetting about my other tasks. Of course, this is influenced by my personality and my ADHD, but it’s something to note if you’re prone to similar behavior. That hasn’t stopped every minute I’ve spent hyper-fixated on Magical Delicacy has been wonderful.
Magical Delicacy’s art style is truly stunning. I’m already a big fan of pixel art games, but the attention to detail and the sheer number of sprites in this game is phenomenal. There’s a huge range of sprite options for the meals you create depending on the types of ingredients and flavor profiles you use, so if you stray from a recipe and still manage to make something edible, it feels extra unique.
The cooking itself is a fun mix of following recipes, real-world common sense, and magical experimentation. It is possible to create ‘failed meals’ (trust me, I have a few in my inventory) but they are few and far between. In the early game, it’s a bit painful to accidentally screw up a recipe as you’re still figuring out where to find ingredients, but the pain fades fast as you quickly gather so many ingredients that you’re not sure what to do with them all.
I’m not the most adept platformer, but so far in Magical Delicacy I’ve found the platforming suitably challenging but nowhere near as infuriating as some of the jumps I’ve seen in other games. It’s challenging enough to make you feel skilled when you nail a jump after a few attempts, but achievable enough to keep me engaged. As I mentioned before, if the platforming is giving you trouble, you can turn on the easy platforming setting.
Story-wise, I was not expecting to be this invested in Grat’s political and historical landscape, but here we are. The storytelling is paced really well, letting you learn more about Grat and the wider world of Magical Delicacy at your own pace in dribs and drabs from the townsfolk. I’m a practicing witch in real life so I’m always intrigued by witchy stories in games, and this one feels oddly grounded in reality, making it feel closer to my own experience in the witchy community than other fantasy stories I’ve seen. Flora’s relative detachment from the town’s history also helps as she’s learning everything at the same time that you are.
I can’t say much more without getting into serious spoiler territory, so take my word for it, Magical Delicacy is a must-play Metroidvania for fans of the genre looking for a less combat-driven story, or cozy gamers looking for a rich and complex magical world with tons of tasty cooking and adorable interactions. If that’s not enough to convince you – you can pet every single cat you come across in this game.
If you need more cozy games in your life, check out our guide to the best ones on Switch and mobile. We’ve also got a list of the best farm games and a guide to the best Switch Metroidvanias.