Brunch Club (Switch)

Pop culture references are always a risky gamble. Not only might they become dated if you bet on the wrong horse, but sometimes they can be viewed as a lazy form of joke telling if there’s nothing clever being said with the reference. Brunch Club doesn’t really tell a whole lot of jokes though, the game mostly keeping its words to invaluable instruction for its multiplayer minigames, but the way it does integrate its pop culture references is surprisingly clever and doesn’t even require the player to know about the film being alluded to in order to enjoy their impact on the game.

Brunch Club can be played alone or with up to four players locally, and while it packs in many modes, the appropriately named Main Course is the one that best shows off its central idea. The players will find themselves viewing a spread of food ingredients before them, whether it be breakfast foods beside the stove, burgers and hot dogs by a grill, or sushi ingredients moving by on conveyor belts. Each player is given a free moving colored cursor similar to the type of beam you’d expect to see coming out of the bottom of a UFO, and with this a player is able to inhabit the items and bring them to life. Whether it’s food, a utensil, or some other piece of kitchenware, the player is now able to move this object around, but these items are all beholden to gravity and the awkwardness of their shapes. Bread slices flop around, eggs roll about, knives can be made to stand tall or just flip along their sides. Different items move with different degrees of ease, but the challenge is often having all the important food items and silverware work in tandem to properly prepare the food required to beat the level’s goal.

Where the pop culture references come in is the level concepts. In Fry Hard, you need to grill bacon and eggs within the time limit… while a sniper is targeting you trying to destroy your ingredients. Night of the Living Bread has sub sandwich ingredients spring to life and flee from the players, and Game of Cones has winter come to chill the ice cream you’re plating but summer’s return will melt anything not in place. These games named for films and television shows don’t require knowledge of what the title puns are, and some like Scone in 60 Seconds really pull off manifesting the pun as incredibly unique gameplay. While you’re spreading butter and jam on the scones in the trunk of a moving vehicle, you literally only have 60 seconds to do so until you start earning time bonuses for each one successfully made. Each of the Main Course levels has three difficulty levels, the game requiring more meals to be prepared on higher difficulties, the timers become tighter, and the amount of lives going from infinite to three to only 1 as the difficulties get harder. Sadly, the level quirks aren’t present in easy mode, making medium perhaps the best pick for a multiplayer session for mixing its difficulty and level modifiers together well for a group session.

Chasing different gimmicks does mean the quality and difficulty of the various levels can vary. A good team can essentially get an unending round of Scone in 60 Seconds going if they have excellent synergy and the ice cream level is surprisingly generous with its timer for something fairly easy, but most levels can still be enjoyed a good amount and they have Face/Off variations where food prep becomes competitive. Players have their own sections to work in but can briefly enter each other’s to interfere by throwing items around, so even the easier levels can find a second life here. Unfortunately, Toastal Recall and pretty much any level or mode involving toasters can be rather slow and frustrating to play. Having to navigate the cumbersome slices of bread into rather small toaster slots is already a chore as the slices inevitably dance around the entrances, but then the gimmick causes things to reset or the toaster pops out the bread automatically before it is done toasting to complicate things. You even have to make your path up to the toaster top which is already a challenge with the available items, and the mix of chaos and tight requirements make Toastal Recall a rather poor first foot forward on the level select screen even though you are able to pick whichever one you please.

While Brunch Club’s Main Course mode is clever cooperative chaos and Face/Off is a decent recontextualization of the stages into a somewhat fun competitive mode, 5 Second Rule is where collaboration will really be put to the test. 5 Second Rule has its own set of unique levels where the goal is to get a specific food item like the pumpkin in Paranormal Snacktivity’s picnic stage or the scone in Pulp Kitchen’s cluttered kitchen through a series of checkpoints. However, should the food touch the counter or table surface all the items are spread out on, a timer starts to climb, the players trying to get the food item through all the checkpoints without filling up that timer to its limit. There’s a regular clock ticking down to add pressure to the affair, but only hard actually gives you 5 seconds of off-the-plate time before you lose. The medium and easy modes are a bit more lenient in that regard but still surprisingly challenging as you and the other players work together to build bridges of silverware and plates to navigate your food around in something similar to a mildly lenient game of The Floor is Lava. 5 Second Rule is definitely the most difficult mode and thus perhaps not the one to whip out for parties, but that does mean it continues to contribute to the surprisingly robust spread of modes Brunch Club has to offer.

The last mode is The Arcade and it certainly seems the most simplistic. Too call it undercooked isn’t just a joke as the arcade minigames are all fairly plain in design and can end surprisingly quickly. A rice ball sumo match to push the other player off the table can be a bit slow-going, Food Ball’s soccer game with rice ball players is also feels a little thrown together with its limited controls, and Butter Brawl’s competitive toast buttering has toasters involved that throw the slices around in ways that can lead to a player’s lead snowballing based on luck. Notably the naming puns are gone for this mode too, but Conveyor Clash comes out pretty decent with the sushi rolls trying to remain on the conveyor belts as objects require them to dodge about to avoid being pushed off. Face/Off is certainly the more interesting competitive mode because it pulls from the game’s strengths despite not letting you actually pick the levels you play, but The Arcade is at least amusing for a short visit.

Leaderboards based on the time it took you to complete a level and achievements for doing things well or doing strange interactions are pretty much the only stuff to chase in a single player run through Brunch Club, the game definitely thriving on playing with your friends to laugh at the absurd level concepts or push through the challenging ones together. The music is made up of some energetic chiptunes, and the game mostly does a good job explaining its rules with minimal clutter, although With A Vengeance simply saying to play Simon Says without explaining how is definitely a detriment to that level’s gimmick. It really does feel like a game that is built to be jumped into with even new players with a good degree of success, with 5 Second Rule there for once people have a hang of it or Face/Off able to please players who prefer to go against each other rather than work together.

THE VERDICT: Brunch Club basing its level designs around pop culture puns ends up with a surprising amount of creativity entering its cooperative kitchen antics. Level gimmicks based around films and shows interfere with the process of putting a meal together in ways that make the main mode’s multiplayer modes delightfully chaotic, and while some levels like Toastal Recall or Game of Cones have issues with the level of challenge they present, overall they make for fun cooperative challenges and exciting battles in competitive mode’s altered versions. The Arcade is rather sparse unfortunately, but 5 Second Rule’s challenging levels really add an extra layer to this multiplayer title to ensure it can appeal to casual players and ones searching for a real test of how well friends can collaborate. The single-player is certainly rather dry since the focus is almost entirely on making funny moments or testing teamwork, but as a multiplayer title, the awkwardly moving food and strange level twists can make for exciting play sessions.

And so, I give Brunch Club for Nintendo Switch…

A GOOD rating. The Arcade’s basic minigames don’t really count against the game at all as they feel like half-baked side content, but the core modes all have their ups and downs that thankfully tip more heavily towards the ups. Main Course has little quirks like Toastal Recall’s frustrations and With a Vengeance’s difficult to parse instructions, and Face/Off really should just let players pick the stages they’re going to, but 5 Second Rule comes out pretty clean even if its higher difficulty level can definitely lead to the most in-fighting as players really need to work together most in it. The other two main modes definitely have their highlights as well, either because a stage gimmick really gets to shine in levels like Scone in 60 Seconds or because the food prep is already wonderfully awkward like how making California rolls involves rolling rice balls into ingredients that stick to it and change how they move. Single player can be challenging on the highest difficulty, but having to delegate tasks and work together in the multiplayer versions of the levels is definitely the most appealing aspect of the game and where Brunch Club shines the most. Players are able to share in their delight over strange impediments like zombie ingredients or work together to overcome bothersome obstacles like the bombs that drop in With a Vengeance. Brunch Club can be rough around the edges in places, but it has plenty of interesting level designs and shifts to its stage hazards to give players plenty to chew on.

Brunch Club’s pun-inspired levels are definitely a fun case of using pop culture references creatively. Sure, the adherence to the trappings of the films and media being referenced can lead to an idea that isn’t well-realized, but Brunch Club’s successes with the idea of theming levels around these puns comes together into stage concepts that few would have been able to imagine independently. Scone in 60 Seconds stills stands out as the best embodiment of this concept’s potential with it pulling from Gone in 60 Seconds’s car thief storyline for the setting and the time in the movie’s title influencing the timer in a reasonable way. The game design ideas built off the back of puns work as concepts for fun multiplayer minigames with an overall food theme and simple play controls connecting it all, and Brunch Club definitely ends up the kind of game where you want to see the next level not only because it will probably be fun to play, but because the creativity behind it, even when it doesn’t manifest perfectly, is still a delight.