If you enjoy cozy restaurant management games, you’re going to love Dragons Dinner. This cute yet chaotic roguelike developed by Menut Studios launches today, with each shift getting busier and more challenging. You’ll serve waves of hungry dragons, hire employees, improve your skills, and gradually redesign the restaurant.
The diner is officially open for business, and we have a feeling you’re going to become addicted to this one.
A Better Restaurant Makes for an Easier Shift
You’re not just responsible for carrying food around in Dragon Dinner. Restaurant layout is a big part of keeping everything under control, with tables, counters, decorations, and other objects placed wherever you think they’ll work best. Customers need to move through the space, employees need to do their jobs, and you need to get between everything quickly enough to keep orders moving.
A few seconds saved on one journey may not matter much at the start of a shift. Once several groups are waiting and the kitchen is falling behind however, those little improvements begin adding up.
Between days, you can expand and reorganize the restaurant to improve customer flow and service speed. Employees can be hired to take some of the work off your hands too, giving you more room to concentrate on whatever part of the restaurant currently needs attention.
There are four restaurants to work through, each bringing different recipes, layouts, and mechanics, so an arrangement that worked nicely in one location won’t necessarily solve everything in the next.
Every Shift Gives You More to Work With
The roguelike progression comes through the skills and equipment you collect as you continue playing. Both have multiple upgrade levels, letting you gradually improve what your dragon can do and build around the parts of restaurant service you’re having the most trouble with. Combined with changes to the layout, that gives you two sides of the restaurant to work on, making your own character more capable while also making the building itself easier to run.
There are eight types of dragon to customize too, because being several orders behind doesn’t mean you can’t look good while trying to catch up.
Progression continues as you unlock restaurants, experiment with different layouts, improve your abilities, and chase better scores and rewards. Eventually, you can work towards Legendary difficulty, where all that time spent shaving a few seconds off the route between the kitchen and the tables should start looking like a very sensible investment.
For anyone who wants the dragons to be a little more patient, there’s also a Cozy Mode that provides more time between customers and unlimited preparation time once everyone has been served for the day.
You Can Bring Another Dragon to Work
You don’t have to run the restaurant alone either. Dragon Dinner supports shared and split-screen co-op, along with Steam Remote Play Together, so another player can join the shift. Whether adding another dragon actually makes the restaurant more organized will depend on the dragons involved.
At least there’s plenty for both players to do. One person can concentrate on customers while the other deals with food, cleaning, or whatever problem is currently slowing everything down. As the restaurant gets busier, splitting those jobs becomes another part of working out how to survive the rush rather than trying to handle every table yourself.
The free demo has already spent months putting those systems through their paces, with Menut Studios making changes to customer management, progression, Cozy Mode, restaurant interactions, and balance ahead of release. Now the doors are properly open.