Another Gorge Review (but it's Pickle's)

[PicklePet]

I really like this event! The aesthetic is absolutely beautiful, I love the premise of a cooking event.
The characters' perks feel very pretty well balanced in respect to the difficulty - a win can be pulled off with any character combination. Though I personally found the role of chopper very boring, I guess other people didn't?? It was never too hard to find some one willing to play it.

The event has been very unique in the way that without advertising itself as such, it's had a lot of different phases of play.

I loved the phase of trying to find new recipes - the only down side was that it felt too difficult to experiment. I wasn't able to keep the clock up for very long and continually fail dishes. In theory it probably could have worked well if I had 2 other players making known dishes to keep the clock up, but I couldn't find any one who wanted to do that.

I loved strategizing for all the achievement runs. I wrote out color coded cheat sheets so I could immediately see which recipes would give which coins plated or unplated.

My favorite achievement is Killing Spree, because I feel like it's the perfect difficulty - it's not so easy that it's boring and it's not so hard that you need to stick to a single strategy to achieve it.

And that brings me to my main criticism of the gorge :< - there were dominating strategies for most things - particularly speed runs (which is how almost every one who achieved the first round of achievements was playing, and which is why I greatly appreciate the second wave of achievements!) of course, the game gets boring when people want to play the exact same recipes every time - and I can't blame them for wanting to do what was most efficient.

I believe one way around that may have been having a higher number of favors required, so that you have to deal with the RNG of more of the last rounds and you actually have to react to the cravings instead of already basically knowing what you're going to need? The second round of achievements did extend my play time by about another week helping other people get the achievements, so that took care of it any way. I guess I just wanted to put on paper why I feel like a lot of people had this feeling like, "I beat the gorge, I don't want to play it any more now."

I also suppose the tournament is exactly the gameplay I was suggesting - the only issue is... most people don't even want to try to compete because they have no hope of winning, a lot of people only want to compete with their close steam friends, and for those that are in it to compete there's waaay too much pressure. I personally would have preferred another incentive (like an experience bonus calculation) but I'm glad that the DST team is trying out new things.

Overall, it's really hard to design an event based on discovery and I think a great job was done! Thank you for this great event!