New game: "Uncle Lee's Cookbook: Five Recipes For Disaster" playthrough!

New game!

Time to dine! Uncle Lee's Cookbook: Five Recipes For Disaster by Relatively Painless Games is the commercially released collection of all Uncle Lee games still available on Apicici's itch.io page. They have been revised and fully voiced, and the collection has been published by Dionous Games.

Something's cookin'...

In a prologue tutorial, the game teaches you the ropes of its point 'n click interface. Standard fare for most of us, but what I very much enjoyed was that hovering over hotspots already gives a description of the item in question. Only too bad that many times when you click on an item, it doesn't do anything else. Hovering an inventory item over the hotspots also shows where it can be used and where it can't. This prevents the annoying "This doesn't work" reply, though it does make the game a lot easier. 

Meet Ines, the actual protagonist!

The next five episodes are stand-alone stories, kind of like episodes of a television sitcom where one family or other finds itself in a pickle due to several misunderstandings. I finished the prologue and first three episodes in a total of one hour and a half, but I needed a bit more than an extra two hours to complete episodes four and five.

I never owned a Gameboy...

For some reason the second episode looks completely different than the others, giving it the appearance of a Gameboy title with monochrome colors. While in the first game the main character Ines is 15 years old, in this prequel episode she is only 10, and in a subsequent episode you'll celebrate her 20th birthday.

You made a time machine out of a VW van?

Ines is the one who always has to solve the problems created by her Uncle Lee's crazy inventions. You will face both time-travelling and reality-changing puzzles, very well integrated both into the storyline as well as gameplay elements. The game has great voice acting, and there's great chemistry between the characters.

Very gothic...

These bite-size adventures are not so challenging, but do require some creative thinking now and then. Dialogue options will change depending on what you have already achieved, information you have discovered, or what you have changed in the environment, and the only time I didn't immediately know how to progress was when I had to talk to a character a second time without realizing it. If you're really stuck, there's an in-game hint system where you can check your goals, then ask further questions about what you need to do exactly, divided into small and big hints.

Don't ask...

I didn't know anything about this game when I started it, so I didn't realize the title meant it was divided into separate episodes. I was a bit disappointed that it wasn't one long, continuous story, but I quite enjoyed these short bursts of adventuring. Just the thing when you have an hour to kill!

You can find Uncle Lee's Cookbook: Five Recipes For Disaster on Steam and on itch.io!

It's been a while with so many new games being released, but for my next playthrough I'm finally going to return to the past for another classic Legend Entertainment game, the second one in the series of a young sorcerer...