Wrap House Simulator Review (PC)

I’m glancing down at this chopping board of mine, dicing up yesterday’s cooked meats and chopping the same leftovers as before, frequently taking the chance to pretentiously glare at the customers through the serving hatch as if to overtly illustrate how tired I am of making the same meal over and over again. But where there’s a hungry guest to feed, there’s a quick buck to pocket. And if I’ve come to learn anything about cooking simulation games, it’s that good things come to those who earn them. There’s often a silver lining to this monotonous graft, even if it does require countless hours of repeatable work to locate. And it’s a tiring process, chasing that carrot on a stick. In Wrap House Simulator, especially, I’m as equally tired, but I’m still showing up to earn the bacon.

It seems that, at least by this point, I’ve become a bit of a dab hand in the culinary arts. I don’t mean to come across as egotistical or anything, but from experience, I’ve been able to learn that, if you can prepare just one meal, whether it’s a hamburger, pizza slice, or a cask of boba tea, then you can prepare just about anything and still reap the same benefits. To that end, Wrap House Simulator isn’t a delicacy; it’s a condiment that serves only to add flavor to an existing hot pot of one too many ingredients. But that doesn’t make it any less of a hearty addition to the soup. It’s just that, well — too much of one thing can make you awfully sick.

That’s a Wrap!

It certainly is a wrap, kind of like how yesterday was a pepperoni pizza, or the day before that was a grilled cheese sandwich. It’s the same thing, different day, basically. The only difference here, of course, is that we’re not talking about sprinkling lashings of bacon strips on a dough base, but neatly placing cucumber slices into a tortilla casing. Remove that from the mix, and what you have here, really, is the same culinary sim that we’ve seen dozens of times before. And by that, of course, I mean that your sole purpose and reason for living is to rustle up food, earn cash, and make small but somewhat profitable upgrades to the shell of your business for the sake of reaping what you sow, yada yada yada. If you think that you’ve heard this one before, then that’s because, quite frankly, you probably have.

Product cast aside, Wrap House Simulator more or less progresses in the same direction as its peers, with the initial phase of your career being spent on small projects—creating small dishes, using primal cooking techniques, and serving only a handful of customers, for example. The steps that follow on from this, too, aren’t massively different either, with the latter stages of the business plan mostly revolving around applying certain upgrades to the kitchen and business to attract more paying guests, and occasionally winning over the hearts of the VIPs and critics who comb through the parking lot with a magnifying glass and clipboard. Moreover, the objective is the same: transform the humble roots of a restaurant into a bubbling hub of profitable produce and services. Again, you’ve seen this one before.

Food of the Gods

The prep work here is relatively straightforward, with most, if not all of the recipes that you create mostly revolving around the same instructions. A wrap joint by trade, your focal point here is the wrap—an easy to build bite that doesn’t require much effort to cook, much less fill out with the various meats, salads, and sauces that you might find dotted around your kitchen table. And that, really, is what you spend most of your time doing here: adding ingredients to the base, and serving customers in a timely manner for a few bucks apiece. The more you sell, the more you can invest in the business, with certain upgrades and lavish perks becoming available the more you subject yourself to the graft.

While the core gameplay loop isn’t overly difficult, it does harbor a few curveballs. Luckily, though, you can either choose to hire NPCs to assist with the workload or turn to a friend and tackle the business as a duo in the co-op mode. The latter doesn’t pepper a huge amount over the vanilla version of the game, I’ll admit, though it does make the process of creating wraps all the more entertaining. Or at least, it does for a couple of extra hours, anyway. Thanks for the hilarious emotes, team.

From a technical standpoint, Wrap House Simulator certainly has a few nasty bugs, several of which interfere with the fluidity of the gameplay. Granted, there’s nothing inherently game-breaking here, though I wouldn’t say that it’s complete without its own share of visual flaws and the odd bit of indie jank, either. Nothing a few band aids won’t be able to fix in future updates, hopefully.

Verdict

Restaurant simulation games are an acquired taste—a taste that, under the right circumstances, is likely to keep your appetite low and your thirst quenched for a dozen hours before it all begins to sizzle on the tongue — if you can stomach it, that is. Needless to say, though, that the act of handing yourself over to a dull and ridiculously repetitive task isn’t going to be to everyone’s liking. It’s a painfully slow process, and it doesn’t always give as much as it takes — which is partly the reason why so many of us abandon ship halfway through the journey. There are perks, but as for whether or not they’re worth the trouble is another question, and one that is likely to invoke multiple answers depending on the person filling the wrap, so to speak.

If you’re tucking into Wrap House Simulator with the hopes of it being on an entirely different wavelength than its restaurant-based adversaries, then I’ll just go ahead and burst that bubble and tell you that you won’t find anything particularly extraordinary here. It’s still a relatively fun game, and it clearly has its own banquet of perks and reasons for you to keep plugging away. That said, with no real defining characteristic to show for its formulaic nature, it’s hard to wrap it up as anything more than a generic cooking sim.