Food Fight

Chef Pete Pumpernickel, a mustache, and a scaffold of ladders and walkways with the lunch rush coming up it. Every ingredient is a platform. Walk the whole length of one and it drops a floor — onto the layer below, which drops too, and onto the plate at the bottom. Build all four dishes and the board is yours. That is the entire game, and it is also your only weapon: anything standing under a falling layer is flattened, anything standing *on* one rides it down and is flattened at the bottom, and each villain caught in a single drop is worth double the last. You are the builder and the bait at the same time. You ride too. Stand on a layer as it goes and you travel with it, which is how you cross a board in a hurry and how you end up somewhere you did not plan to be. Four kitchens, and each one changes the physics rather than the paint. The Diner is plain floors and plain rules, and it is where you learn the dance. The Sushi Bar spills rice underfoot, so you do not stop where you meant to. The Cantina is the fussy one: anything that falls more than one floor shatters, so you work top-down and never leave a gap under something. The Pizzeria runs half its floors on belts that move you while you are trying to stand still. Some things have to be cooked. A raw patty glows pink; drop it onto a burner, leave it there while you go and do something else, and come back for it. Served raw it still counts — for a lot less — so the burner is a bet on how long you can keep three villains busy somewhere else. Seasoning is scarce and never kills anything. Each kitchen hands you a different one: pepper stuns what is in front of you, wasabi catches things behind you too, hot sauce leaves a fire trail, and oregano sends them wandering off the wrong way. Bonus food tops up the shaker. The Processed Empire is not a single kind of enemy. Hot dogs, pickles and fried eggs give way to Mr. Bacon, who is faster than you are and cannot climb a ladder; Mrs. Fries, who comes apart into two smaller problems when flattened; and The Milkshake, which never catches anybody and gums up the ladder you were about to use. Three chefs, a board that saves after every clear, and a curve that keeps going: once you have been round all four kitchens they start again, faster. There is a daily board everybody plays from the same seed, and three assists — slower villains, kitchen grip, a bottomless shaker — which are ranked on their own leaderboard rather than the classic one.