Magical Delicacy: A Cozy Game That Left Me Hungry for More

This is the first thing I noticed upon arriving in Grat Harbor: Magical Delicacy is a game of beauty, love, and warmth. Pixelated waves beat against the bow of the ferry, the grandfatherly civil servant Higge waited to greet me on shore, and I knew there was something magical here. This sense of magic followed me into every corner of Grat as I explored, eager to see what vista or hidden cove lay past the obstacles before me.

Sidequest was provided with a copy of Magical Delicacy for PC in exchange for a fair and honest review.

I will admit, I was worried about these obstacles at first. Magical Delicacy is in many ways a platformer—its Steam page calls it “metroidvania-inspired.” Platformers are not my favorite genre, but I don’t shy away from them, especially when they do something with the form I don’t expect.

I winced as I fell from a platform in the jungle of western Grat for the first time, right into a patch of brambles. Flora, the player character and a young witch who moved to the island city-state hoping to find a mentor, flashed red and… I realized there was no health bar. In fact, the only effect when I hit a bramble was Flora being pushed back. There was no danger here, no game over. Flora cannot die.

This raised questions: is this game, which markets itself as a cozy platformer, just using that word as shorthand for not challenging the player? What does the gameplay add that wouldn’t be better delivered in a comic or film?

But something interesting happened as I explored Grat. I noticed that even without the threat of a game over, the cost of a mistimed jump was the same. The cost was my time.

The platforming in Magical Delicacy isn’t hard (though it does have some optional challenge levels). It doesn’t seek to punish you, and there are a wealth of granular accessibility options that I’d describe as accommodating to anyone’s relationship with the genre. In Magical Delicacy, platforming is not a test of skill, it’s an invitation.

The game uses navigation and exploration to bring you into the environment of Grat. The “punishment” for failing a jump is simply having to try it again. It felt like the game was asking me to slow down, and spend a little more time actually being in that environment. This is something I’m doing now, willingly, as I write this. Flora’s standing under a rainy moon as ravens caw and a slow and hopeful horn plays in the background.

To be honest, in these early stages of the game I completely misunderstood the source of Magical Delicacy’s challenge. The challenge, and primary mechanic, of the game was the cooking. At first, the game provided an easy exploration of the system while I followed recipes and completed meal requests to gather money and fill out my kitchen. Quickly though, things became more complex. Characters started to request contradictory flavors and ingredients. The ingredients I needed became rarer. The recipes I had became insufficient. I had to rely on trial, error, and my witch’s intuition to solve the puzzles put before me.

There were little tricks to making more consistent meals. My life changed the moment the “Determining Flavors” codex entry popped up, providing some light explanation of the mechanics that influence a dish’s outcome. But I fucked up. A lot. And with rare ingredients.

The cost of these failures was the same as it was with platforming—I needed to try again. When I wasted all my white longhorn mushrooms, which I did every time I needed them, I had to leave my shop and harvest replacements from the world of Grat. If I was lucky I knew which merchant sold what I needed and it was a quick adventure—but I was rarely lucky.

The loop was: try a recipe, make a mistake, then spend more time in the beautiful world as penance. By the end game I knew the island of Grat with the intimacy of someone who actually lived there. I knew the little fairy nooks where I could find my fablecaps, and the secret cave my royal petal grew in.

I found myself getting lost in the game. My first day playing I was at it for nine hours. Between the art and the characters, it was easy to imagine a life as the new witch of Grat. It evoked memories of watching Kiki’s Delivery Service for the first time—that sense of possibility, of making it on your own as a young witch. And it managed this without treading the same story beats (besides maybe the premise of a witch moving to a seaside town to start a business).

Magical Delicacy is something entirely its own. But I will keep comparing it to Kiki’s Delivery Service for a moment, because there is a similarity to how people talk about the “wholesome,” “cozy,” and “magical” Ghibli aesthetic, and how Magical Delicacy is marketed. And if we’re speaking on an aesthetic level, Magical Delicacy really does evoke my memory of Kiki. But it’s not only the aesthetic: there’s something deeper tying the two the two in my mind, and it’s the negative space.

Magical Delicacy captures something about cooking I’ve never seen in a game. It captures waiting with attention for something to finish. I could maximize my time waiting, put some mushrooms in the dehydrator, run to the pantry for something I forgot. But I will always end up standing in front of the oven so I don’t burn my dish.

This was my favorite part of the game. The gift that cooking gives us: a quiet moment where we can just be. This negative space brought me into the game, into the world. What some may experience as friction, a forced pause in gameplay, is what stopped Magical Delicacy from becoming a checklist of ingredients and to-dos.

Waiting by the stove I started thinking, what kind of dish do I want to make Shuya? Not because I want to maximize my star rating, but because I genuinely wanted to make the best dish I could for a friend. Just like Flora, I wanted to help.

One of the moments from Kiki’s Delivery Service that has burned itself into my mind is when Kiki is carving her broom. She’s lost her magic, and there is a long lingering shot of her sitting alone in her room, carving a new broom with tears in her eyes. As a viewer I get to sit with what she’s feeling in that moment. I get to take it in and empathize.

Trusting your audience to take quiet moments in good faith is a brave choice, and it makes Magical Delicacy better. There is a quest where Asa, the owner of a failing teahouse, asks me to make a cup of tea for her friend—a friend who didn’t want to sell me a kettle for fear my better-located store would run her teashop out of business. Making that cup of tea, waiting for it to brew, I didn’t have anything to do but think about these characters’ involvement with each other. What this cup of tea would mean for them, for me, and our now competing businesses.

There’s a hiccup in that last bit, though. In these moments of negative space I had time to think about these characters’ involvement in place, in the history, economy, and politics of Grat. And to be honest, with the exception of dragon hunter Silas, who is dead certain that killing off every last bit of megafauna on the island is how Grat stays safe, nobody seemed all that tied to the place. They can explain their presence in the world, their goals and actions, but the moment they conflict with Flora’s wants or needs they dissolve like candy floss. It’s disappointing because I wanted to be anchored in the world of Grat—it’s an interesting place!

(Warning: There are some spoilers over the next two paragraphs.)

We learn that Grat was an uninhabited island settled by a monarchy in order to exploit the magical Ryver’s resources. Only, as with most colonialist projects, the island wasn’t uninhabited. There are local fauna (like dragons) who rely on these resources, and sentient indigenous peoples (like fae) with opinions on how the resources should be managed. Now the monarchy is crumbling as the Ryver’s resources dry up.

But this is the secret story, explained through people’s opinions on the hunting of dragons, and in some of the island’s other witches’ plan to magically sacrifice the dragons to restore Grat’s prosperity. Of course, Flora is one of the good witches, who want to save the dragons, and everyone agrees with her, except when they don’t. But even those that don’t agree with Flora are friendly and accommodate the newcomer, quickly shutting down their evil plans without argument.

Magical Delicacy whispers its strongest message. It buries the conflict. Nothing goes wrong for Flora, she is new, and right, and no one is willing to argue. The insolvent city of Grat is crumbling, literally. Half of the platforming comes from decaying infrastructure like bridges and stairways. But Flora is given property on an interest-free loan (in a part of town with roads that don’t require platforming to reach). Asa doesn’t contest this, doesn’t ask that limited city resources be used to fix the crumbling staircase leading up to the beloved teashop her grandparents ran. Instead, she ultimately concedes that Flora should sell tea too, and gives her permission to buy a kettle while cheerfully making plans to go out of business. So the teahouse will shut down, the dragons will live, and somehow everyone still has money to buy my luxury foods in the midst of a recession.

The evaporating conflict gives Magical Delicacy its cozy aesthetic, but to bring Kiki back again, I can only feel cozy in a world that challenges me. Kiki’s moment with the broom only means what it does because there is heartbreak before it. The same can be said about the workers’ exploitation in Spirited Away, and the toll of war on Howl. Coziness is a refuge from the cold and hard moments in life. It is a break and respite from a great and complicated struggle.

In a game that builds a world where queerness and cultural diversity are allowed space to breathe without having to be justified, where a fight for ecological justice takes center stage in the narrative, I just crave that extra push outside of my comfort zone. That would be what gave Magical Delicacy the same sticking power as its aesthetic inspirations.

But I acknowledge this is not a fair comparison to make. Magical Delicacy is a beautiful game that is filled with love and mechanical depth. It sets out to give the player a comfortable way to spend some time and imagine life as a cute kitchen witch, and it succeeds. It showed me what was possible when a game trusts me to sit in the world it gives me, and its biggest fault is that it left me hungry for more.