You can get Frostpunk, PlateUp! and more fun games in the Tycoon Titans Bundle

PlateUp! is fantastic and I can’t recommend it highly enough. In much the same way that FTL introduced roguelike mechanics to the “being a spaceship captain” genre, PlateUp! introduces them to the restaurant management genre. I got it a few months after it released in August 2022 and have over 150 hours in it so far. It runs flawlessly in Proton (I’ve often wished it got a native Linux version just so I could submit an article here about it), and it controls excellently on the Deck – I’ve spent probably dozens of hours playing it on mine (and on my desktop, it works equally well with mouse & keyboard and a controller in my opinion, due to its simple control scheme of movement + four buttons).

Basically, you have a little restaurant where customers come in and you have to take their orders and serve them. As days pass more customers arrive, and every third day you get a choice of two possible options to take which increase the difficulty in some way, though often with a slight customer reduction (one will be a new food dish to serve, the other is usually some sort of customer behavior or modifier). If a single customer’s patience bar ever fully depletes your run is over and your restaurant gets shut down, with you goal to survive 15 days (which lets you set up a “franchise,” choosing some of the options you took to do a New Game Plus run. You can keep going into Overtime after day 15, however, and I’ve personally made it to Overtime day 22 using the game’s other main feature: automation.

With the money you earn each day, you can buy a variety of appliances which allow you to automate food production. It starts simple, like a mixer which can automatically chop ingredients or a portioner which automatically takes portions from larger dishes like soups, but eventually you’re designing complex systems which can handle multiple ingredients, chopping and heating and combining them into a finished product, all borne along by conveyor belts (perhaps all the way out of the kitchen to waiting customers!). I’m not 100% sure if every dish in the game can be automated, but it wouldn’t surprise me and an astonishing number of them can be. Designing a Factorio-like layout to optimize production efficiency and extend your route just one more day is its own flavor of addicting. (I find games like Factorio and Satisfactory fun, but they quickly become too complicated for my brain to handle once they extend beyond what I can see all at once. In PlateUp!, there’s a pretty high level of complexity that can be attained, but it all always fits on one screen, which keeps it manageable.)

And while it can be played solo, it truly shines in multiplayer, where you get to find out how good you and friends are under pressure when there are three customers waiting impatiently outside in the snow, table 4 still hasn’t had their onion soup served yet, and will someone please clean up the customer’s mess on the floor because it’s slowing everyone doing front-of-house down, and also I said they needed a medium steak on table 2, not a well-done…!