- DB
All You Can Eat | game review
For such a light serving, it's worrying how quickly you'll feel like you've had your fill
Game summary: Meet a modern hero of our times, a man so lazy he decided to quit his job and just spend his life inside an All-you-can-eat diner. As years go by, his freeloading nature becomes legend, but then a tragedy occurs - the diner is about to close down! (Steam)
This is going to be a short post because All You Can eat is a short and not particularly interesting game. In fact, the visual style of appearing like pen on paper - which might well be how the graphics were done - is by far and away the most interesting thing about the game, and even that feels like a missed opportunity to something interesting with the idea like turning pages or ripping through a panel to skip ahead.
The biggest issue this game has going for it is that it's not particularly funny, which seems like a cardinal sin for a game where the cheapskate protagonist is trying to keep a restaurant he lives in thanks to having a voucher for all he can eat. Maybe the people who made the game found it funny, but it mostly comes across as immature and eye-rollingly stupid, making the short length a good thing.
It's not a complete disaster though as the click-and-point gameplay means pretty much anyone can pick up All You Can Eat and play it to completion with ease, although - like A Case of Distrust - there are a couple of 'puzzle' solutions that are bizarre to say the least. And, in contrast to much bigger dev teams, at least the game works properly.
That might seem like faint praise, but I have played similar games like this where you can get caught in an infinite loop, or simply get stuck from making actions in a certain order that makes progression impossible. I didn't encounter any issues like that here, so I think it's something worth mentioning - the less said about the rest of the game, the better.
All You Can Eat is a short, simple adventure game that doesn't really have much going for it other than the nice effect of making the entire thing looking like it's on paper (which it might well have been) and the fact that at least it works properly. Otherwise, the story isn't particularly interesting or funny, which it really needed to be for the subject matter, and certainly nothing I would ever want to play through again.
