Sedap! A Culinary Adventure is a tasty love letter to Southeast Asian cuisine in game form

It’s one thing to learn about the cuisine of Southeast Asia, but it’s another when you’re struggling to make Ambuyat to please a spirit as Sago Worms are breaking your comically large pot, all while the chicken and rice you left in the wok is going bad because you’re spending too much time fighting a gigantic turtle for a pineapple.

Okay, well, most of those things don’t happen in real life (except for the pineapple turtle, I won’t elaborate), but they do happen in Sedap! A Culinary Adventure. Developed by kopiforge, a new local studio on the scene, Sedap! is an indie cooking game where two friends, Som and Gon, explore the mysterious land of Khaya while unlocking recipes from the mythical Makanomicon cookbook. as you could've guessed, the star of this game is Southeast Asian food.

Right off the bat, if the game’s main purpose was to showcase the sheer breadth of Southeast Asia's cuisine, then it’s done its job pretty well. To the layperson who may only be familiar with what’s common in their locale (me), it’s a learning experience to get a taste of what the cuisine of the wider SEA region looks like. 

The game is also as ambitious in its representation of Southeast Asian cuisine as it is with keeping gameplay interesting. The game is both single-player and multiplayer, and features a 42-level campaign that brings you through three different parts of Khaya: A forest, a beach and a mountainous region. But, as it always is with these kinds of games, lurking behind the whimsical charm is an insidious force: Kitchen Management. I played the single-player campaign and a little bit of multiplayer, so let’s see how this game fares.

A hunter-gatherer game

Before starting this section, any mention of a multi-character cooking sim brings to mind the Overcooked series. The premise, after all, is quite similar; cook dishes and serve them to customers, while enduring kitchen chaos as more orders pile up.

That is where the comparisons end, however, because the game presents one of its main distinguishing features right from the get-go: You’ll have to gather ingredients yourself.

That’s right, it’s a cooking game, but it also happens to be a hack-and-slash. Basic ingredients like rice and noodles are given to you, but you’ll have to fight enemies like chickens (or Wak Waks), oxen for meat, and robots for kaya. You’ll also find yourself fishing for sea creatures, and gathering vegetables from plants strewn around the map. Cooking is no simple matter, either; across the game, there are about six main ways to make dishes (not counting drinks), and each one of them have their own quicktime events to complete before the cooking timer even pops up. And this isn’t even counting the variations of those six types of QTEs, which can differ slightly from dish to dish.

Speaking of hunting and cooking, Som and Gon have their different strengths as well. Som has an advantage in the kitchen, where he’s able to cook dishes faster, and can even equip items to skip QTEs (we’ll touch on that in a bit). Gon, as the hunter, has more HP and deals more damage.

This hook has the potential for a pretty compelling gameplay loop, as each dish is a hard-fought affair. Most dishes require three or four ingredients to make, meaning that you’ll likely be facing off multiple enemies for a single plate. Communication is key in multiplayer, too, as the player behind Som is more likely to be aware of what ingredients are needed in the kitchen than the one behind Gon. And this isn’t mentioning the more mundane actions like chopping or mashing ingredients, which only take a few seconds but adds an additional step to an already complex food-making process.

For single-player, all these mechanics are largely manageable at the start. But it’s when the game starts throwing even more curveballs at you that you’ll be feeling the pinch.

A not-so-casual game at times

As you approach the mid-game, more stage-related mechanics are introduced, all of which add time to the entire cooking process. For instance, in the beach region, you’ll have to deal with rising or falling tides. A higher water level means that certain low-lying paths are obstructed, which adds a couple more seconds as a shortcut to your main kitchen area is blocked off. The geography of the map also changes as you progress. The game starts off with wide and easily-navigable spaces, with a few isolated pockets accessible via logs and platform-operated doors. But by the time you get to the beach and mountains, the maps increasingly feel more like islands of land connected either by long and winding paths or perilous passages. And this isn’t mentioning the teleportation mechanics, which can be either one- or two-way.

It doesn’t help that the map sizes get pretty unwieldy as the game progresses. The only preview you get is a pan around the map, with no minimaps or guides should you forget or miss out where certain ingredient sources are located. A large map size isn’t a problem in itself, though I would have appreciated additional guides to help you during the round; I feel as if the pan can be a bit slow when all you want to do is start cooking. And when specific ingredients for a dish get spread around to different corners of the map, a lot of the time spent in single-player ends up being used for running around.

Added together, it results in what feels like an unforgiving game, especially for single-player. It came to a point where half an hour was all it took to get burned out, and it necessitates a careful orchestration of events in order to get a dish out fresh and on time (which ingredients to gather first, what ingredients to stock up on, and so on). 

For multiplayer, though, the challenges the map presents are more manageable. There’s a ‘Teletotem’ mechanic that allows you to teleport ingredients back to the main kitchen at various points in the map; coupled with the way Som and Gon’s abilities are structured, that means that Som will probably be staying around the kitchen area to cook and receive ingredients, while Gon can hang around the extremities of the map to hunt and gather. The time that would be spent in single-player running around the whole map is cut in multiplayer, and the division of responsibilities makes the game less draining, even if there’s an added element of communication to juggle. It does make me wonder if the gulf in difficulty between the two modes was intended to be this wide, or, if similar to Overcooked, the game was primarily designed for multiplayer. 

But perhaps this is just a case of misplaced expectations. For me at least, I thought that gameplay was going to be hectic, but that I wouldn’t have to think too much about it. Instead, the game might actually be better suited for those who enjoy micro-management and min-maxing. You might not think it, as the game doesn’t last that long in an absolute sense (it takes about 10 hours to finish the campaign if you don’t max out every stage), but it requires a deeper level of pre-planning, at least greater than what you’d expect for a pick-up-and-play party game.

For example, you can customise Som and Gon’s loadout, including weapons and utensils that can affect damage, cooking and gathering stats. They also have special abilities; Som's utensils typically have health or cooking centred-abilities, like the above-mentioned power-up that lets you skip QTEs, while Gon's weapons usually deal with offense, like a heavy attack. You can also find charms with various health, speed and cooking buffs.

This loadout system is not as in-depth in its customisation capability as dedicated roguelikes, but it points to Sedap! requiring slightly more dedication than a casual game. Pair this with other perks the game gives you, like a preview of what dishes are featured in the level and the excess time you get in making the first dish, and you can feasibly map out where all the ingredient sources are, and stock up on ingredients for future orders. This is just the tip of the iceberg, as each world has its own unique mechanics based on its setting, all of which you’ll have to plan around.

One more thing that I found notable about multiplayer: While Overcooked is well-known for being 'the game that breaks friendships', I didn't really feel that here. With the way Som and Gon's roles are set up, we more or less knew what our respective tasks were (hunting, food processing, cooking etc.). And as we spent most of our energy communicating and completing those tasks, there wasn't much room for arguments.

A game with charm

Now we get to what is arguably the meat of the game. There are over 50 recipes within the Makanomicon; many of these will be familiar to Singaporeans, and global hits like Bubble Tea surely need no introduction. But, as mentioned, the game showcases Southeast Asian cuisine in a wider context, which makes it a great starting point for those looking to expand their palette with dishes from the region. 

Those dishes are depicted delightfully as well. The use of colour in the art is quite eye-catching, and the descriptions in Makanomicon that are short, but informative about how the ingredients form the dishes’ taste profiles. The use of the three different regions are also well thought out, representing the tropical forest, maritime archipelagos and mountainous highlands of Southeast Asia. The designs of the enemies have a fantastical whimsy to it; a chili plant that physically fights you kind of parallels how chili plants evolved to become spicy to ward off mammals. However, there's also a bit of stylistic mismatch with where the game pulls inspiration for its obstacles; the rafflesia plant and food-stealing monkey are two examples of obstacles based on Southeast Asian wildlife, but it's contrasted with elements like speed strips and falling platforms which feel plain by comparison. 

I mentioned that the game can be unforgiving sometimes, but there are welcome quality-of-life features. As Som and Gon have their respective strengths in cooking and hunting, the game automatically switches between both of them in single-player, depending on whether you’re in or out of the main kitchen area (though you can still manually swap if you choose). You don’t have to worry about whether you’re using the right character for a given task. Dynamic split in local co-op is also pretty nifty; the game goes into a single screen when both characters are in the same area, but fades in a split when one character moves farther away. And while the QTEs can be hard to figure out at times, a recent patch included some better visualisation and button prompts to make it a bit easier, which looks to be a player-requested addition.

In fact, while the game has had a rocky launch based on its Steam reviews, compliments should be paid to the devs for being extremely responsive, especially considering that kopiforge’s core team consists only of four people. For better or worse, the game has seen multiple patches since its recent release, and certain critical issues like online multiplayer stability have mostly been resolved (bar the odd disconnect here and there). Outside of bugs, the developers are also open to player suggestions on their Discord server, including balancing adjustments and quality-of-life upgrades. So, there's a chance that some of the problems noted in this review might be resolved as time goes on.

Did they cook?

I'd say so. Ultimately, I had fun playing the game, and learned a good bit about Southeast Asian food, too. I will say, the multiplayer is probably where you'll get the most fun out of this game. Getting through single-player felt like a chore at times, even after adjusting my expectations, and part of the fun in these kinds of games is finding a dynamic that works for you and your co-op buddies. As of right now, though, there are still a couple of things from multiplayer, like a proper way to choose characters (the host is currently locked to Som, and player 2 is locked to Gon).

In all, it might be a little off from what I expected, but there's an audience for those who like a heavier side of patience with their kitchen management cooking game. And of course, in multiplayer, there's the satisfaction you get when you two get into a flow state and dishes start coming out like clockwork.  In an interview prior to the release of Sedap!, the game's producer called it a love letter to Southeast Asia. And I think it shows, even if the game can be frustrating at times. 

SEDAP! A Culinary Adventure is out for PC (Steam) right now. A console release is currently planned for Q3 2025.

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