A whimsical yet demanding cooking card game where British comfort food, Wonderland guests, and ruthless timers turn every service into a tense deckbuilding puzzle.
Abra-Cooking-Dabra is a strange and delightful mash-up: a frantic cooking sim, a deckbuilder, and a Wonderland story all shuffled into one very tense service. It’s smart, demanding, and surprisingly generous with depth – as long as you’re ready for a game that’s more pressure cooker than cozy café.
Concept & Setting
You play a down-on-their-luck chef in London who, desperate for a restaurant concept, clicks a suspicious email and is promptly yanked into Wonderland to run a magical mobile café. Your new “boss” is a smug, talkative Cat who sets impossible deadlines, watches your every move, and occasionally throws you a bone – or, more accurately, a new card.
Orders come from Wonderland’s oddball clientele: toves, borogoves, mome raths, and other Carroll-inspired guests line up for very real British dishes. The contrast between grounded food (roasts, pies, comfort classics) and nonsensical guests gives the game a very specific charm: it feels like a British cookbook was dropped into a pack of playing cards from Alice in Wonderland.
The story doesn’t dominate, but it gives just enough context – you’re paying off a kind of magical debt and rebuilding a lost collection of recipes – to make each new level feel like another step in your odd culinary exile.
A cooking sim… built as a card game
At its core, Abra-Cooking-Dabra is a cooking card game. Every ingredient, appliance, and action is represented by cards that you combine and sequence under tight time pressure. Customers arrive with ticking timers and specific dishes; your job is to assemble, cook, and deliver those plates before their patience runs out.
Think “Overcooked, but your pantry is a deck”:
- Ingredients & tools as cards – Meat, vegetables, seasonings, pans, ovens, and more are all cards you lay out, combine, and transform into finished dishes.
- Deckbuilding between services – Between levels, you invest your earnings into booster-like packs and new kitchen equipment, shaping the “flow” of your future runs.
- Puzzle-like orders – Many dishes require multi-step chains (prepare dough, chop fillings, bake, garnish, etc.), turning each ticket into a mini logic puzzle under time pressure.
Structure, progression & difficulty
Abra-Cooking-Dabra offers more than 25 levels, plus a hidden endless mode for players who want to stay in the kitchen indefinitely. Across the campaign you:
- Unlock over a hundred dishes, steadily expanding your culinary repertoire.
- Encounter around sixteen guest types, each bringing different quirks, demands, or complications to service.
- Purchase new appliances and utilities that speed up certain steps or open new recipe lines, giving a tangible sense of café growth.
The difficulty curve is where the game really makes a name for itself:
- Early levels feel like a slightly quirky cooking sim.
- Midgame shifts into full-on plate-spinning: timers everywhere, complex recipes, and tight resource management.
- Late stages are downright punishing, asking you to deeply understand how your deck cycles, which cards to scrap or upgrade, and how to route orders with minimal waste.
Most reviewers highlight how complex and demanding the systems are, but also how satisfying they become once everything clicks. It feels more like mastering a deep puzzle game than casually serving a few burgers between emails.
Atmosphere & Presentation
Abra-Cooking-Dabra leans into a whimsical Wonderland aesthetic:
- Characterful art – Anthropomorphic animals, eccentric guests, and the ever-present Cat give the game a distinct personality.
- British comfort food – The emphasis on classic British dishes gives orders a grounded, appetizing feel even as they’re being served to fantastical creatures.
- UI & feedback – Timers, ticket boards, and card slots are clear enough once you’re used to them, though some icons (especially on booster packs and small plant/ingredient symbols) can be hard to read at a glance.
Audio-wise, the game builds a nice rhythm of sizzling pans, chopping sounds, and timer pressure. It’s not a purely “cozy” vibe – that relentless ticking tension is always there – but it works: you feel like you’re in a magical kitchen that never truly sleeps.
The writing is light but playful, with plenty of wry comments from the Cat and small bits of flavor text that reinforce the absurd setting without slowing down the pace.
Strengths
Inventive genre fusion
Successfully mixes deckbuilding, puzzle logic, and time-management cooking into something that feels fresh rather than gimmicky.Deep, interlocking systems
Complex recipes, card synergies, and meaningful between-level upgrades give the game real strategic depth and strong replay value.Wonderland theming that actually matters
The Alice-inspired guests and smug Cat boss aren’t just a skin; they frame the whole structure of the restaurant, the dishes, and the story beats.Plenty of content
Dozens of levels, 100+ dishes, many guest types, and a hidden endless mode make this a surprisingly chunky package for an indie title.Positive reception from both critics and players
Early critic impressions lean solidly positive, and Steam user reviews sit in a “Very Positive” range, especially praising the originality and challenge.
Verdict
Abra-Cooking-Dabra is a standout twist on cooking games, transforming familiar “serve customers fast” chaos into a layered card-driven puzzle. It’s inventive, mechanically dense, and thematically cohesive in a way that many genre mash-ups never quite achieve.
However, it’s also intense. The timers are strict, the recipes are demanding, and the systems can feel overwhelming until you really put in the time to learn them. Add some early bugs and slightly cluttered iconography, and it’s clear this isn’t the universal pick-up-and-relax experience some might expect.
Recommended if:
- You enjoy games like Overcooked, PlateUp! or frantic restaurant sims, and you like the planning and optimisation of deckbuilders.
- You appreciate high-skill, “learn the system and master it” design.
- The idea of card-based British cuisine in a Wonderland café makes you smile instead of frown.
Skip or wait for patches if:
- You want a genuinely relaxing, low-stress cooking game.
- You’re easily frustrated by complex systems, harsh difficulty curves, or occasional launch-window bugs.
For the right player, Abra-Cooking-Dabra is an easy recommendation: a cleverly designed, card-shuffling kitchen that rewards obsession, experimentation, and a high tolerance for magical workplace stress.