I love a good restaurant management simulator. There’s something oddly satisfying about frantically rushing around trying to complete orders before your customers storm out of the door, muttering something under their breath about you. As much as I love this chaos though, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t keen to find a game that mimics this pace but without the overarching stress. That’s where Midnight Ramen Shop comes in, or so I thought.
As the title suggests, you’re put in charge of a ramen shop. Inspired by one of Japan’s most popular ramen chains, Ichiran, you never have to see your customers face-to-face either. They come in, sit down behind a shutter, fill out a form you hand them to customise their ramen, and then receive their order when you get around to making it. Once they’re done, you lift the shutter, take their money, and close it for the next person. It’s efficient, and certainly strips away the stress of having to deal with customers directly.
When you take on an order, you can scroll across to your ramen prepping station and start popping ingredients into a bowl. This starts with the broth, which you have to use the specific broth ladle for, followed by the noodles, which also come with their own specific tool. Then, you’re free to add whatever aromatic oils and toppings your customer desires before scrolling back across and giving it to them, being met with a happy face above their shutter, and then receiving your payment.
It’s incredibly easy to get the hang of. And if you’re lost, you can conveniently check the ticket in the top right corner to see what they wanted exactly. Before long, I got into a real flow of taking on orders and making them within half a minute to keep my customers happy.
But the footfall never really picks up in your restaurant, so you don’t really have to worry about customers storming out or waiting particularly long as there’s not much else to do besides making bowls of delicious ramen. After day five in the demo, I started to feel like I was really plodding along and not making any progress.
(Image credit: SilentKeep)
This isn’t helped by the lack of real upgrades either, at least right now. At the end of the day, you can use your hard-earned profit to buy things like new ingredients or new furniture for your restaurant. This furniture makes no difference whatsoever to the visual appearance of your restaurant (or at least what you can see from the two views of it you have) so you just have to trust it’s doing its job, which can be anything from getting more customers through the door, or increasing the chances of your customers leaving tips. From my experience though, neither of these actually made any difference, which I’m hoping changes by the game’s full release.
So there I was, throwing noodles and toppings into bowls and serving my customers, when all of a sudden, I wanted to test whether or not you needed to feed them the right thing to get the same amount of money. Unfortunately for my next customer, all my morals of being the perfect chef went out of the window. Instead of chicken, they had beef broth—criminal, I know. But, to my surprise, they left the same amount of money as all my other customers who had received their correct meal: $20.
(Image credit: SilentKeep)
From here on out, I needed to test to what extent I could get away with this, so everyone’s orders went well and truly out of the window. I wasn’t even checking the tickets, I was just slinging broth and noodles and whatever oils and toppings I fancied and practically throwing it at them, only to be met with a smiley face and some money after a few seconds. This wasn’t the punishment I expected. There were no angry customers. I could get away with whatever, or so I thought.
After trying this method for a couple of days, one customer left me $13. I don’t blame them, really; I had given them practically everything they ordered incorrectly. It wasn’t a huge loss but at that moment in time I felt guilty, and questioned if my previous customers only paid because they felt like they had to. Since I couldn’t see their faces, they might’ve been fuming that they ended up with chicken rather than beef, or their tofu had been substituted for egg, and I simply wouldn’t know. For a cosy game, it’s probably not a bad thing to not have to deal with angry customers, but I can’t deny the fact I missed it.
Midnight Ramen Shop could do with a little refining before it releases in full to perhaps show people like me that your virtual actions do have virtual consequences, but for someone looking for a more laid-back restaurant sim, it certainly delivers. I enjoyed the methodical process of creating all of my visitors’ ramen bowls, and would be keen to revisit my little shop at launch. I just hope I’m not forced to go against the grain to spice things up and can stick to doing my job correctly from here on out.
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