Honestly, I fell in love with these old cooking games that anyone with half their wits could play, these simple pick-up-and-play games that people could enjoy on their daily commute, games like Diner Dash, Papa’s Fooderias and Cooking Mama, just to name a few off the top of my head. Nowadays I feel that this type of game has all but died out, as most cooking games have become more like restaurant management simulators, which usually put you in the businessman’s perspective, where you manage how the restaurant works and watch as you passively make money.

That is to say, there aren’t any games that capture the essence of old arcade-y feeling cooking simulators, Papas is still going strong and there are some game studios like Kairosoft whose whole identity is to make games that are Arcade-style in nature, though the games that Kairosoft and Papas are interesting enough by their own merits, the type of game I was hoping for was served not on a platter of its original world but in the world of a certain Red-White Shrine Maiden.

Touhou Mystia Izakaya is a fangame created by Dichroic Purpilion [二色幽紫蝶], developers who seem to be veterans in the Touhou fangame scene with their other titles being Touhou Nil Soul and Touhou Blooming Chaos. Mystia Izakaya was released on October 1st, 2021 and has gained the quite rare overwhelmingly positive tag with its 19,500+ reviews.

Story

You play as Mystia Lorelei, a sparrow bird apparition who owns a small cart that sells grilled lampreys to people wandering around at night, and the story begins with her helping her friend Kyouko Kasodani out of debt by taking out a loan of the same amount and paying hers off with the money she just borrowed so that she can now work at her izakaya cart and sell enough to earn the necessary amount of money to finally pay off her debt.

There is also the fact that one of the city’s most powerful apparitions has gone mad with an insatiable hunger, and her retainer and the other high-ranking apparitions/people in power believe that only you can satisfy her hunger, but that doesn’t affect the story until a few months in.

Gameplay

The game is split into two sections, the gathering section in the morning and the restaurant management section in the evening, in the morning you can travel around different areas to gather ingredients from the land and buy drinks and other food from merchants, you only have a limited amount of time and each action you take takes 30 minutes off the clock.

Once the clock strikes 6:00 pm, you must choose an area to claim and set up your Izakaya, each area has 3 levels of Izakayas that you can unlock through a side quest or by progressing through the days.

In the restaurant management section, before you even open your restaurant, you are tasked with choosing what cooking equipment, recipes and drinks you want to serve for the night, the dishes and drinks are all marked with their price and tags to guide you on what the customers want. Once you have chosen the dishes you want to serve for the night, the real game begins as you are now tasked with serving the customers whatever they want from the menu you have set up for them, they will automatically sit down and speak their order to you, your job is to cook and serve both dishes and drinks to the customer as quickly as possible.

Some rare customers don’t explicitly say what they want, but rather talk about the tags of what they want, like they want something special, they want a vintage drink, and so on. There is also a rhythm game that you do every time you cook a dish, which gives you one of three buffs if you get it right, which stacks up.

Visuals and Music

Utilizing pixel art aesthetics and simple ambient music tracks, Mystia Izakaya does the best it can with what it has to give a grounded yet ethereal feel to the places you visit, and while pixel art has its limitations, it does pack each pixel with detail that makes even the simplest cucumber look tasty.

The music meanwhile is half and half for me, it is great to listen to and to play as a background track as I write this review but I don’t think it’s something that I would remember to pop on when I’m on the road as it’s competing with the likes of Shibayan Records and Joe Hisaishi in my mind. Although with its more ambient and very large track selection, having 94 songs available to play and listen to in their OST list, there will be some tracks that I would like more and others that I would skip a bit more frequently.

Conclusion

I don’t think this game would be for everyone who likes restaurant simulators, as it has a rather overly cute and cozy vibe that screams pastel core. Although I’d still recommend it to most people, honestly, stylized games like this are a little hard to find these days as the Triple-A market focuses on realism and it feels like this is trickling down to the Double-A and Indie scene as well.

Give this game a chance, you won’t regret it since it’s cheap but will easily fill you up like a real Izakaya would. But I would highly suggest buying the whole ‘whole’ game as there’s the base game and 5 DLCs and you should play it without the DLC first but with all 5 DLCs, the game feels complete. Touhou Mystia Izakaya is available on Steam and Nintendo Switch for PHP 332 for the base game and PHP 166 per DLC or a single purchase of PHP 1206 for the whole game and DLC.