Magical Delicacy Accessibility Impressions

Earlier this year, at the Access-Ability Summer Showcase 2024, we showcased a trailer for a game called Magical Delicacy, published by Whitethorn Games.

Before I jump into my accessibility review of Magical Delicacy, I want to be clear up front about that context.

While I went out of my way to showcase Magical Delicacy as an example of a promising accessibility focused video game releasing in the year ahead, I do not feel any obligation to cover the title in a purely positive light upon its release. There’s a lot that I think it does well, but there are a couple of points of friction that I had when playing the game.

Basically, feel free to treat this review with some scepticism as recentlyI showcased the title during the Access-Ability Summer Showcase, but I do wish to assure you that my inclusion of the title in this year’s showcase isn’t preventing me from having critical feedback of the released game.

Anyway, context given, let’s dive into the review proper.

Magical Delicacy, releasing today on PC, Xbox, and Switch, is a 2D perspective platforming adventure game where you play as a young witch who has moved to a new town with a dream of serving local residents magic infused meals. 

Part exploration game, part farming and cultivation sim, part platformer, and part quick time event recipe experimentation narrative, Magical Delicacy tasks players with finding new ingredients, new recipes, new ways to prepare food, and new ways to surprise and delight people with increasingly specific tastes.

Jumping into the game’s dedicated accessibility settings menu, there’s a good variety of options available for players to tweak elements of the game to aid in accessibility. Starting with controls and motor accessibility, the game offers the ability to turn off disappearing or time sensitive platforms, removing stress and fast reaction times from platforming sections of the game. Minigames requiring reaction timed button presses can also be skipped, and button hold inputs in the game can be disabled.

For legibility, players can switch Magical Delicacy’s default stylised font to one of two alternative font choices, OpenDyslexic or Hyperlegible. Seeing Hyperlegible included alongside OpenDyslexic was very positive, as it shows an understanding that OpenDyslexic is not a one size fits all solution for supporting Dyslexic gamers. Players can also switch off dialogue effects such as moving text, and set dialogue to appear immediately rather than progressively when a text box appears.

In terms of increasing visibility, players can Switch on a solid outline around Flora, the main character, as well as dimming daytime backgrounds, increasing nightime brightness, increase UI scaling, and increase the size of control prompts in the UI.

Found in other sections of settings, players can turn on or off tutorial hints, alter input sensitivity, and tweak audio volume via sliders.

While all of the included accessibility settings found in Magical Delicacy were very much appreciated, I did experience some difficulty in my opening hours with the game, which did negatively impact my experience playing prior to release.

While the initial story beats of Magical Delicacy do a decent job of guiding the player through reaching their new home and cooking their first recipe, a stew including mushroom, vegetables, salt, and no spice, after this the game somewhat leaves the player to explore on their own with minimal guidance, and I struggled to know how best to get into the intended flow of the experience.

Exploring Grat, your new home town, the player can find multiple characters who want specific dishes cooked for them. The issue is, very little guidance is given to guide the player on where to find new recipes, where specific missing ingredients can be found, or how to make the most of ingredients you might not be able to restock for some time.

One example of this, your new home features a garden where certain items can be planted to grow your supply rather than cooking your last remaining specimen. Knowing this earlier could have helped me avoid using up my final mushroom in a cooking experiment, not realising I would struggle for a while to find a way to replace it. 

While I did eventually overcome this initial hurdle, I did find myself spending my crucial first hours with the game running around in circles talking to every NPC I could find looking for things to purchase, and grabbing every lose ingredient I could find on the floor, unsure how to progress, frustrated when I couldn’t progress because I had no idea who could help me acquire a specific variety of honey or literally any type of herb for some rations, or how I could get more currency because I bought things that were not helping me in the present to progress.

I imagine this will be less of an issue for those playing the game post release, as I doubt it will take long for walkthroughs and guides to appear online for anyone who, like me, struggles with early progress. That said, it was the experience I had, and it is a real shame, because once I got past some of that initial confusion and muddled my way into forward progress, I actually really enjoyed my time with Magical Delicacy. From the charming art style, to the welcoming and amusingly written characters, to the cycle involved in finding ways to satisfy people with experimental new meal types, there is a really fun game to be found in here.

While some recipes in game will be fairly specific and prescriptive about exactly what needs to be combined for success, others allow more room for experimentation within categories. If a stew just needs a mushroom, water, vegetable, and salt, what mushroom and vegetable you add will obviously change the end resulting meal, but so will whatever final ingredient you potentially add to your cauldron’s empty slot. 

This was part of my initial learning curve of the game. You can just put something into a recipe, not knowing exactly what the end result will be, but trusting your gut the right attributes will emerge in the end. That’s a little scary to do when you don’t yet know how best to renew your resources, but getting comfortable with that kind of experimentation is where I found some of the best moments of fun in the game.

Magical Delicacy is a delightful and charming game, with some really nice accessibility features. I wish I found its early hours easier to navigate, but hope that anyone in my shoes will have the benefit of post launch guides to help smooth the early experience out. There’s a really worthwhile game experience to be found here, just one that takes a little experimentation and frustration to initially get into the rhythm of.