Cooking Companions 2: Dread Weight

"Chompettes! Let's mosey out!"

Nonsensical meandering story, i should have learnt my lesson from Cooking companions and not bothered with this. Every time the story starts getting intense or interesting some animated talking animals show up and pull the story back. They arent funny they are just annoying.

Very aimed towards achievement hunters and completionists, which I am neither. Very disappointing, as I was able to get the full story of Cooking Companions in a single playthrough. But with this sequel, it became clear very quickly I'd have to play multiple times and do different routes to even know what's the plot.

potato

Amazing horror visual novel with an excellent amount of lore buried within it that is tied to real world events, much like Cooking Companions. Deer Dream Studios has a talent for writing compelling fiction centered around this type of lore and I often find myself digging into history after completing a game to get a deeper understanding of the story as a whole. Much like Cooking Companions, there are some folklore elements in this one, however it expands beyond just the Baba Yaga this time! An excellent game where I was actually had to replay the game a second time to find a very important tidbit that had COMPLETELY gone over my head the first time!

Great sequel to Cooking Companions

As someone who was a massive fan of Cooing Companions and waited eagerly for this game's release ... I advise you to temper your expectations of it being as good as the last one, because I personally don't think it is. The story feels a bit rushed and rather confusing on where it's supposed to go or what it's trying to say, there feels like a multitude of missed opportunities with character growth and interactions, most of the alternate endings feel exactly the same so there is very little point in doing them, and do NOT expect the items you collect to be helpful in finding said other endings - the majority of them do nothing at all. (I understand that a house will, realistically, have useless items, but this feels more like a pain in the neck than a cool feature for this game in terms of realism versus expectation.) However ... despite all I find wrong with it ... I cannot deny, this is a Cooking Companions game. The sound design is second to none in terms of how creepy and unsettling it is. The artwork is horrific in the best possible ways. The animations are a lovely step-up even if I prefer the artistic style of the prior games. I adored the mythological aspect and the feeling, as a player, of trying to figure out just what entity we were dealing with and frantically Googling things that seemed important, like tree species or hair in water. And this is, genuinely, one of the few games where certain scenes and images still flash in my head late at night, or gave me nightmares and restless periods of sleep after spending hours dying to 100% it. I still cannot listen to whispers in other games without having the visceral reaction that I'm about to die to some horrible, mutilated enemy from Dread Weight. Perhaps it just touches on all my fears perfectly. But I think it's well-worth the play, so long as you expect good horror and not understanding ♥♥♥♥, provided you play it only once.