Cooked

Cooked: Slot Overview

Another casino game maker has entered the maelstrom, going by the name of Hold Your Hat. Kicking things off with its debut title, Cooked, the studio serves up a cluster-pays slot loaded with a long list of ingredients. It tells the story of a bitter chef named Jean-Pierre Gratin who has been shipwrecked on a tropical island, and has set out to create a dish so powerfully flavoured (Le Grand Brûlé) that it literally threatens the world. However, a group of islanders, who are all animals, have ganged together to take Jean-Pierre down before what pours forth from his makeshift jungle kitchen causes a global catastrophe.

With that sort of back story, it stands to reason that Cooked would be an unusually presented slot. In the base game, the play area is surrounded by a sizzling cooking device above a sad, imprisoned monkey, while ingredients and various kitchen instruments are placed on the other side. A devious soundtrack evokes images of an unhinged chef darting around a stove, sprinkling pinches of bizarre spices into pots bubbling with bizarre ingredients, before tasting the broth with a wooden spoon and cackling in delight. The free spins phase turns up the heat, literally on screen, while dialling up the menacing tunes.

Cooked is played on a 6x6 grid that can expand up to 10 rows as the action unfolds, giving the layout room to stretch when momentum builds. Wins are awarded for clusters of five or more matching symbols connected in any direction, vertically, horizontally, or diagonally, effectively blending a connected-ways feel with a traditional cluster system. Hold Your Hat rates the volatility at 6 out of 10, placing it firmly in the medium range, while the RTP is set at 94%. Bets can be adjusted from $/€0.10 up to $/€100 per spin.

There are 6 different pay symbols on the table, and each symbol has five levels of values. The symbols are gloves, some kind of spray bottle, a container of purple items, a canned compass, chopped tomatoes, chef hats, and diving masks. At the lowest level, a 20 OAK win pays 15x-50x, whereas at the highest level, they pay 90x-300x the stake.

Cooked: Slot Features

What's been poured into the feature pot are cascades, various feature symbols, a free spins round with a persistently growing multiplier, and feature buys.

Cascades

Wins from clusters are collected, then the winning symbols are removed. All feature symbols on the grid, except magnet and multiplier symbols, are moved to the inventory. Remaining symbols fall downwards, and new ones drop to fill the grid. This repeats as long as new winning combinations appear.

Inventory

Feature symbols are the lemur, toucan, chameleon, shark, magnet, heart, and multiplier. All feature symbols except the magnet and multiplier are moved to the inventory after a win. After a symbol refill, the inventory activates from left to right. All feature symbols except the heart and multiplier only activate from the inventory. Extra life counters track the remaining activations for feature symbols, and still count down on symbols that cannot perform their feature. Symbols are removed when they run out of extra lives.

• Lemurian Flip - The Lemur points to a symbol and flips it downwards or sideways. Any symbol on the same row or column flips to become the first one. Coins are increased in value when they flip, and any Lemur, Shark, Chameleon, or Toucan symbol on the path triggers. Magnet, heart, and scatter act as a stopping point for the flip. If the path hits another lemur, the flip is rotated 90 degrees and continues in the two new directions.
• Toucan Spell - Puts a spell on a selected payout symbol, increasing its payout level by one or more steps for the rest of the game round. Will switch to a different pay symbol if it has reached its max level already.
• Chameleon Flash - Zooms in on a payout symbol, and when the flash goes off, all instances of another random pay symbol set are transformed into the selected one.
• Great Blue Shark - Cuts the game grid with a knife and clones one or more rows to create a larger grid. When the maximum number of rows is reached, the Shark upgrades pay symbols instead.
• Magnetic Collector - The magnet symbol in the inventory collects all coin values in view. Multiple magnets in the inventory also collect the values from each other. Pay symbols with a magnet attached, leave behind a magnet symbol when they are removed. If coins are attached to pay symbols, they are also left behind if the pay symbol is removed.
• Heart - Activates before any active features in the inventory. It increases the extra life counters for each feature symbol in the inventory by its displayed value, then is removed. Pay symbols with a heart symbol attached leave behind a heart symbol when removed. The heart activates and increases the number of times all current feature symbols in the inventory can activate, then is removed.
• Multipliers - Only appear in the bonus game. When activated, it increases the global multiplier by its displayed value.

Free Spins

Landing 3 scatters triggers 5 free spins. Each additional scatter awards +1 free spin. The current symbol payout levels and number of rows carry over to the bonus game, but the inventory is emptied. The inventory also empties between spins. The multiplier remains persistent throughout the round, and landing scatters awards up to 8 extra free spins.

Feature Buys

The Bonus Hunt costs 5x, and it provides 10 times the chance of triggering a bonus game. Coin Rain costs 10x, and it starts each spin with at least 5 coins, and when triggering the bonus game, 5 coins appear on each free spin. Magnet +5 starts with a magnet with 5 lives in the inventory, and a long-lived magnet appears in every free drop if the bonus triggers for 25x the bet. Buying the bonus costs 100x, while 500x buys the super bonus, which awards a coin rain on every spin.

Cooked: Slot Verdict

Kudos to Hold Your Hat for not taking the safe and easy debut route. Instead of tepidly dropping off something mainstream, the studio has dived right into the thick of it by teeing up its new release with a bizarre backstory, populated by peculiar characters, no more so than its head chef Jean-Pierre, who sounds like he's lost a marble or two after baking on the remote tropical island. Going big on backstory is a little risky because it puts a lot of responsibility on the actual action to follow through. Fortunately, for the most part, Cooked's gameplay has been well thought out, preventing it, on the whole, from feeling half-baked.

There are a lot of ingredients to savour, too, as Cooked is one of those cluster paying slots with a decent-sized handful of supporting modifiers and effects. Cluster wins provide a starting point, and letting diagonally connected matching symbols contribute makes for a nice change. From there, Cooked's various feature symbols can get to work. On an individual basis, it's hard to think of any that majorly stand out on their own, but working together is when they appear to perform best. In fact, Cooked felt like a game where multiple effects really need to come together to produce anything substantial. Bonus rounds could be hard to get going, and the game could feel strangely flat, even when it was performing. Or at least, it could have injected extra adrenaline into the moments when it was really popping off to get the pulse racing.

Still, for a debut, Cooked is quite impressive, and despite the studio leaping straight to the lower RTP side, there is plenty of good stuff here for culinary players to sink their teeth into. Instead of heating up a piece of white bread toast for its first slot, Hold Your Hat has gone for a multi-course flambé, capped with 10,000x the bet winning potential, which might be a bit eccentric, but it certainly isn't bland.