You’ve got three burgers waiting to be cooked, somebody’s ordered a steak, and there’s a table full of hungry customers wondering why their food hasn’t arrived. Your friend is desperately washing plates, the kitchen layout is causing a traffic jam, and you’ve just realized nobody remembered to buy enough equipment for the new dishes on the menu. Meanwhile, the customers keep coming.
FirstPlate opens its doors on Steam Early Access today, inviting players to discover just how quickly a perfectly respectable restaurant can descend into culinary chaos. Developed by TwinkleToes Studios, this first-person cooking and management game combines hands-on food preparation, restaurant building, and roguelike survival with online co-op for anyone brave enough to run a kitchen with their friends.
From Tiny Kitchen to Table-Filled Nightmare
Every great restaurant has to start somewhere, and in FirstPlate, that somewhere is a small kitchen with a handful of basic appliances. You’ll begin with a modest operation, preparing meals, serving customers, and earning enough money to improve your setup. What happens next is entirely up to you.
Rather than working within a fixed restaurant layout, you can purchase additional floor grids and expand your establishment as much as you like. Walls, floors, counters, and appliances can all be arranged to suit your plans. Want a compact little burger joint where everything is within arm’s reach? Go for it. Fancy building an enormous restaurant with dozens of tables and enough kitchen equipment to feed a small army? That’s an option, too.
Of course, bigger restaurants mean more customers, more orders, and way more opportunities for somebody to forget where they put the plates. A clever layout can make service much easier, while a poorly planned kitchen might leave your entire team running around each other trying to deliver a single burger.
Too Many Cooks? That’s Your Problem to Solve
Once the doors open, all that careful planning gets put to the test. FirstPlate puts you directly into the kitchen, where you’ll chop ingredients, cook meals, assemble dishes, serve customers, and clean up afterward.
Everything happens in real time, so there isn’t much opportunity to admire your beautifully arranged counters when the orders start piling up. The menu adds another potential problem. There are six menu stacks and more than 50 ingredients in the Early Access version, allowing you to run anything from a burger restaurant to a steakhouse, pizza place, or breakfast spot.
Each menu brings different preparation requirements, meaning the equipment that worked brilliantly yesterday may be completely unsuitable for today’s dishes. Switching from burgers to pizza sounds great until you realize your kitchen isn’t set up for the new workload.
You’ll need to purchase the right appliances, rearrange your workstations, and make sure everything is ready before the next service begins. Or you could just open the doors and hope for the best.
Today’s Special: Roguelike Chaos With Extra Stress
While Career Mode focuses on building a successful restaurant over time, Endless Mode is where FirstPlate gets its roguelike feel. Here, the objective is to keep your restaurant running for as many days as possible while the difficulty continues to climb. At the end of each day, you’ll draft new menu cards that introduce additional ingredients, dishes, and complications to your existing operation.
What began as a manageable little restaurant can gradually turn into a kitchen juggling far too many recipes, with every new addition forcing you to rethink how the business operates. The challenge comes from adapting before the next dinner rush overwhelms you.
You’ll need to keep expanding, buying equipment, and finding more efficient ways to prepare meals while trying to avoid the mistakes that can bring your run to an abrupt end. Survive long enough, and you can earn a place on the global leaderboards.
It’s an entertaining way to turn restaurant management into a survival challenge, particularly when your carefully planned kitchen starts resembling a culinary obstacle course.
Four Friends and One Questionable Business Plan
Running a restaurant alone is demanding enough, but FirstPlate also lets you recruit friends for some cooperative kitchen mayhem. Up to four players can work together online, dividing responsibilities between preparing ingredients, cooking meals, serving customers, and keeping the restaurant reasonably clean.
Communication is going to be important here. There’s little point having three people frantically cooking burgers if nobody’s actually taking them to the customers. When the menu starts expanding, you’ll need to decide who’s responsible for which dishes before the kitchen becomes a confusing mess of half-finished orders.
The game also has a competitive Versus mode in development, where two rival kitchens share the same dining room and compete for customers. The idea is to serve tables before your opponents can claim them, stealing potential revenue while using Sabotage Cards to interfere with the rival kitchen. Those cards can slow down cooking, disable appliances, and even allow players to invade the opposing team’s workspace.
The developers describe Versus as playable, but still being refined during Early Access, with the store page also highlighting it as a post-launch focus. So, while the main attraction today is running your own restaurant, there’s an even more cutthroat culinary competition being prepared.
The Kitchen Is Open. Good Luck, Chef.
FirstPlate enters Steam Early Access today with Career and Endless modes, cooperative multiplayer, and a restaurant-building system that lets you create everything from a tiny café to a sprawling dining empire. TwinkleToes Studios expects the Early Access period to last approximately six to twelve months, with plans to add more ingredients, menus, and content while improving multiplayer and competitive play.
There’s also a free FirstPlate demo available on Steam, featuring Endless Mode for anyone who wants to see how long their kitchen can survive before committing to the full game.
Whether you’re planning to build the world’s most efficient restaurant or simply want to find out which of your friends completely loses their mind during a dinner rush, there’s plenty of opportunity for things to go spectacularly wrong. Just make sure somebody remembers to wash the dishes. That mountain of dirty plates isn’t going to disappear on its own.