For some people, cooking in real life is a chore, though the delicious results can often make up for the frustratingly long prep times and complicated recipes.

We’ll be taking a look at games that aren’t cooking-exclusive games (we already have a list of those below), but feature a functioning and fun cooking mechanic that immerses you in the experience of cooking, making the chore of cooking engaging even for the laziest of chefs.

8 Minecraft

Eat, Mine, Build

Eating in sandbox games doesn’t always need to give stat bonuses, especially if the hunger meter is a constant threat in games like Minecraft.All they need to do is keep you fed and alive.

Since its release, the game has added a myriad of foods that players can craft, either on a Crafting Table or cooking them in a furnace. Other than the rare golden apple, which regenerates health and provides damage resistance, most foods in Minecraft don’t provide any bonuses besides filling the hunger bar.

Any Minecraft player knows the hunger meter all too well–from difficulties easy and up, your health only regenerates when your hunger meter is full. But before the 1.8 pre-release version back in 2011, the hunger bar wasn’t introduced yet, so eating would instantly heal you instead of how it is today. Surprisingly, the pixelated food in Minecraft looks kind of appetizing…

The only way you can heal instantly now is to drink health potions that you can brew, which you can create through a brewing stand where you can mix ingredients you collect from across the world.

7 Stardew Valley

Eat ‘Til You Drop

Stardew Valley is essentially a dating sim, farming sim, and an RPG packed into one cozy sandbox, and it’s not surprising that it features a cooking mechanic for your character to make proper use of the raw ingredients you collect.

You can cook meals once you install a kitchen in your house, or you can craft a cooking kit and make your meals outside if you have a high enough Foraging skill level.

Each recipe can be unlocked in different ways: watching the Queen of the Sauce TV show every Sunday, buying from shops, skill level-ups, and strengthening your bonds in the small town.

In Stardew Valley, cooked food can do a lot for you, especially if you’re trying to give yourself a boost during gameplay as you toil the day away. Meals like the Farmer’s Lunch can give a huge boost to the Farming skill, or Sea Foam Pudding if you want to net some big catches while fishing.

Alternatively, some dishes can also just make you money if you sell them, notably Sashimi, which sells for a flat 75g regardless of the size or type of fish. This could be a profitable dish to make and sell if you’re strapped for cash and also happen to have a decent relationship with Linus.

6 Monster Hunter Wild

The New World Kitchen

Monster Hunter’s gameplay has always been frustratingly slow for my personal preferences. One thing that keeps me coming back, however, isn’t the adorable Palicos or the badass armor, but the cooking scenes that never fail to make my stomach growl.

So imagine my glee when I saw Monster Hunter Wilds returning with a cooking mechanic, where instead of making meals via the canteen in Monster Hunter World, the developers instead wanted the player to be able to cook anywhere, deeply immersing you in the world and the cooking scenes.

The cooking mechanic itself is well-thought-out, as eating a meal before a hunt is the quintessential part of Monster Hunter’s gameplay loop, where you can buff your health, stamina, and any resistances that make a difference between life or death.

As long as you have the ingredients, you can plop down your camping stove and cook away, even while your fellow Hunters are fighting for their lives. Alternatively, you can whip out your camping stove and just drill some meat in a minigame, which can serve as a quick healing method if you find yourself on the ropes during a fight.

Game director Yuya Tokuda aptly explains that eating meat right before a hunt just “feels intuitive.” A man after my own heart.

As a game with some of the best depictions of food I’ve ever seen in gaming, Monster Hunter Wilds leans into the cozy homemade meals of its predecessor, and depicts food with the same amount of love and care as Studio Ghibli puts in their movies.

5 Genshin Impact

Master Chef Teyvat

On your journey through the colorful landscapes of Teyvat in Genshin Impact, you’ll no doubt come across and collect a plethora of raw ingredients like mushrooms, herbs, meat, and seasonings. Despite being a free-to-playgacha, Genshin Impact’s addictive gameplay loop is surprisingly in-depth.

As expected of any RPG, Genshin Impact’s cooking mechanic can let you create different types of dishes, each with unique benefits like healing, reviving, and stat boosts. But to begin cooking, players must learn the recipe by purchasing it from restaurants and stores scattered across the game, and you’ll need an open fire to cook. Not only that but if you cook dishes that may be a favorite of one of your characters, then they’ll receive a bonus.

While the game doesn’t dive deep into explaining the mechanics, seasoned Travelers will tell you that cooking is an essential mechanic that you’ll need to learn in the mid to late game, as most meal effects will provide percentage boosts rather than set numbers. By holding a button and releasing it at the right time, you can boost the dishes to their fullest potential.

Still, Genshin Impact’s cooked meals are more like supplements rather than a core mechanic to succeed in combat, as you’ll still need a strong team and reliable gear to get through certain activities. Regardless, it’s still fun to pause the combat and exploration for a nice culinary session along your adventure.

4 Kingdom Hearts 3

Making Gusteau Proud

As Sora and his friends embark on a perilous adventure in Kingdom Hearts 3 through a series of Disney worlds, they’ll come across familiar and beloved characters who might need their help.

While hacking and slashing through Heartless in Twilight Town, Sora encounters Remy from Ratatouille, who runs a gourmet restaurant with Scrooge McDuck. Kingdom Hearts 3 has a cooking mechanic where Sora can help out in the kitchen of Le Grand Bistrot to boost the restaurant’s star ratings.

With the help of Little Chef’s human-piloting skills like he did with Linguini, Sora can whip up gourmet dishes through a series of minigames. Each cooking recipe features one of four minigames, each with its own challenge: chopping vegetables tests your speed, cracking eggs and flambéing the food tests precise movements, and using the pepper grinder challenges your timing.

While cooking in KH3 isn’t exactly the core mechanic, completing all the mini-games will not only reward Sora with boosting items like the Gourmand Ring, but it’ll also reward him with the Grand Chef Keyblade, which is earned after completing 20 Classic Menu dishes.

3 Like A Dragon: Pirate Yakuza In Hawaii

Goro Majima: Parts Unknown

There’s something special about homecooked meals, even if it’s in a video game.

As Majima sails the Hawaiian seas and runs around the streets of Honolulu, you’ll come across Goro Goro Kitchens, where you can create a variety of homecooked meals that heal or boost your Madness and Heat gauges.

Not only that, but you can also cook meals for your pirate crew, raising their morale and leveling them up.

To cook a meal, all you have to do is just use a Goro Goro Kitchen and prepare it by completing a maximum of three minigames. Successfully creating a meal also boosts Majima’s chef level, which can also unlock recipes down the line.

The hardest part about cooking isn’t the cooking mechanics itself, but rather finding enough rare ingredients in the mid-to-late game, as more complex recipes demand a lot of sleuthing and farming if you’re trying to boost your crew’s level or create a gourmet meal.

Still, creating homecooked meals is a much more engaging and rewarding way to heal instead of traditionally buying food from a convenience store in any other Yakuza game.

2 Battle Chef Brigade

Hell’s Kitchen: Ghibli Edition

By blending the thrill of hunting monsters with the gourmet chefs striving to be the best in their craft, Battle Chef Brigade is an incredibly unique game that makes it this high on the list because its gameplay perfectly balances two gameplay mechanics that normally wouldn’t have gone well together.

While playing as protagonist Mina Han, you must first hunt for your ingredients by defeating all sorts of monsters through side-scroller combat, then collecting parts that they drop. These drops have unique flavors or element gems that you must cook by completing match-three puzzles that accumulate scores to enhance your dish.

As gameplay becomes more and more complex, you’ll start finding stronger foes and better tools to cook your dishes. You can also challenge your fellow Battle Chefs in a cooking duel, where you both must create dishes that fit the elemental flavors that the judge or customer is asking for.

With a simple hand-drawn art style reminiscent of a Studio Ghibli film like The Cat Returns, Battle Chef Brigade mixes and stirs together thrilling action with the satisfying feeling of popping bubbles in matching puzzles.

1 The Legend Of Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom

Somebody Feed Link

Much like its predecessor, Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom implements a cooking mechanic where players can collect ingredients and monster parts to create a myriad of meals and elixirs to help Link survive not just his enemies, but the harsh environments of Hyrule.You can even bring these recipes to real life with “The Unofficial Legend of Zelda Cookbook” by Aimee Wood Works.

By finding any stove or open fire scattered across the settlements in Hyrule, Link can throw a combination of five ingredients and whip up some tasty-looking meals that can replenish his health and stamina, boost his stats, and provide resistance to status effects.

While meals always have a health-replenishing effect, elixirs don’t provide any health bonuses but provide stronger or long-lasting buffs that range from cold resistance to attack boosts. To cook elixirs, you only need some monster parts and the appropriate critters you gather throughout the environment.

But there are also risks in creating dishes, as sometimes putting together incompatible ingredients can result in Dubious Foods, which not only wastes your hard-earned ingredients but also does next to no healing whatsoever.

Besides, they look so unappetizing that the game has done you a favor by censoring it into pixelated purple goop.