From Lobby to Kitchen

You always begin in the lobby. In our case, the lobby isn't just a menu screen. It's an old warehouse that doubles as your base of operations, and you can actually move around in it, not just stare at it.

This is where you meet up with friends, change your character, pick your weapons, try out recipes, practice your aim, or kill time with a few minigames while everyone else finishes arguing about who's cooking tonight.

When you're ready to head out, you choose a mission and travel to one of the kitchens. Maybe it's a New York diner, a grand Italian pizzeria, or a classic Chinese restaurant. Each one has its own layout and its own recipes, so showing up and winging it is, at best, a bold strategy.

Once you arrive, nobody's rushing you yet. Take a lap. Check the ingredients. Get a feel for the kitchen before the timer makes all of that irrelevant.

Then the orders start coming in.

You gather ingredients, prepare dishes, plate them, send them out. And of course, that's exactly when enemies decide to get involved. Throw food at them. Grab whatever kitchen tool happens to be within reach. Or, if subtlety has officially left the building, pull out your actual weapon.

When time runs out, you get rated on how the service went, for better or worse, and you're sent back to the lobby to do it all again.

From there, regroup, change your setup, mess around for a bit, and decide what's next.

Next week, we'll show all of this in action during our developer stream.