This is an ongoing list where I attempt to do the following: Play, Complete, and Rank every video game in the known universe in order to finally answer the age old question "What is the greatest game of all time?" For previous entries find the links on the attached spreadsheet.

How did I do?

Do you remember Overcooked? The cooking game that was meant to be played with 4 people and it was usually hectic that required master communication and constantly yelling at your friends in order to succeed? I remember that game and I remember how badly I wanted to play it after watching Giant Bomb play it on stream, but it turns out my friend group found it too stressful, so I never got close to beating it. I always kept it tucked away because maybe just maybe I would find a group better suited to play it, or I could convince my kids when they are older and ready for some nonsense to play it, but until that time I have been dreading spinning it on my wheel, because I think it would be quite miserable to play solo.

Well good news for all of us, or mainly just me, I didn’t spin Overcooked, but I did spin a game called Very Very Valet. “Valet,” as we can call it now, is one of the many similar games that came out in the wake of Overcooked that decided to play on the same field just without the cooking. Like Moving Out, Tools Up!, Totally Reliable Delivery Service, etc, these are games where you are initially tasked with something mundane but because of the wacky 4-player hijinks, things can get out of hand fast and you need to adapt on the fly or risk losing. Something as simple as carrying moving boxes, or, in this case, parking cars, becomes a race against time and the level to deliver the goods.

In “Valet,” you are a valet driver who is working outside some premiere locations who must not only balance the amount of cars coming in looking for you to park them, but also people who are leaving the establishment and would like their cars back to head home. Each car operates on their own timer and should any timer reach 0, then that car disappears and you get a strike to your score. Since I am comparing this to Overcooked, then you can guess that there are some “wacky” things that are happening in the world around you. Magic portals, car launchers, dealing with planes landing and taking off, each level has an element that is designed to make the mundane task anything but mundane. Perhaps the only parking spaces are on the roof of a neighboring building, or maybe an earthquake is happening causing the level around you to collapse.

Lets start with a basic level. In a basic level there is one line of cars that are looking to have their cars parked, and then a line of people leaving the locations that are looking to have their cars brought back to them. Outside each location is a designated area where cars have to be returned to, in order to count as a successful retrieval, but cars being parked can kind of go anywhere. How you organize the cars for speed is up to you. If you want to double park, or toss them all into a pile, block traffic, or find the actual parking spots is completely up to you, as long as when they are being requested back you can get them where they need to go. Customers when you are taking their car from them, will usually tell you if they are going to be in the location for a short time, medium, or long amount of time to help you determine parking preferences, but ultimately during the hectic <5 minute levels you probably won’t care or treat them any differently. After a set number of cars have been serviced (broken into rounds), then the level ends and you are scored on how you do.

I must specify that, the only score that really matters is whether or not you had any failed timers. The game operates on a star system with 3 stars being the most, and every missed timer takes one star away from your score. To unlock further levels and advance in the game you will have to hit star thresholds, so your primary focus should always be focused on preventing failed timers. Other than that, I am sure your score is better based on speed, or how much damage is done to the cars before being dropped off, but the game does not really make that an important talking point. Never was a customer upset about me flipping their car off a building before delivering it, or parking one in the middle of a busy intersection as it got hit by every car trying to go past, as long as I delivered before their timer then all was great. Outside of your personal best score, I did not see a leaderboard or anyway to compare scores with friends around the world, which gives even less an incentive to worry about how the score is calculated outside of getting 3 stars on every map.

Which is where I will now admit that I did not play the game on it’s own terms. I found a loophole and took advantage of it in every instance. See what the game wants you to do; is to drive each car to a parking spot, and those parking spots are always somewhere crazy, because the fun is then having to navigate that secondary location while under time constraints. I never followed that play style. I would jam every car into the return window, so that customers when leaving the restaurant would either be able to walk directly into their waiting car, or the car would be centimeters away from the final destination. I might have to nudge a car forward or backward to hit the return space, but it was far faster than having to retrieve it from the moon or wherever they wanted me to initially park the cars. There are a handful of levels that anticipated this loophole and put up “no parking” spaces that you actually aren’t allowed to leave a car in, as a new timer would tick very quickly until you moved it out of the spot, but out of ~30 levels in the game, that issue maybe only came up in about 5 of them. I certainly felt at times like I was cheating the game, because I would beat a level, that was clearly supposed to be more difficult without breaking a sweat simply because I jammed every car forward so that I could make the return process as seamless as possible. I’ll reason with myself and say: I only did this, because I was playing a 4 player party game by myself, and I had to make adjustments to survive. In a perfect world, you have 4 people transporting cars all over the map, communicating in style and pulling off sick tricks, but changes had to be made playing by oneself.

With that being said the game can have some great highs. I didn't play the full game multiplayer, but when I did it has those moments you would expect from these types of games. Hectic action, cars flying everywhere, excited yelling and victory replays are enjoyable. It's an easy enough game to understand and not a whole lot of moving parts so it can be an entertaining family game or something younger kids can play that won't really block their progress as they attempt to beat the game. Even playing solo, I never regretted my time playing the game. I knew I was "cheapening" the experience by my exploits and playing solo, but I still had fun playing it. It's a short game and that can be its biggest strength and weakness. It doesn't wear out its welcome and just as you are mastering the game and maybe getting sick of the loop, its over. Could they have squeezed more levels in, or did a DLC pack that came with a 10 pack of levels and a new character to play as, sure. The game doesn't need it, but if this game became one of your family plays it would have been nice to expand the length. My nitpicks with this game a very surface level, that doesn't mean it's your new champion, but it's also not going to be scraping the bottom.

That did remind me how bonkers the default controls are in this game. So the default controls for this game are ones you should not use under any circumstance, and one of the first patches for this game was to give more options at controlling. Under default setting you just point the control stick in the direction you want to go and the car goes in that direction. Little green arrows show the direction the car is going to go, and should you need to reverse you need to center the control stick and then point it in the opposite direction you need to go. It doesn’t sound terrible written out, but it feels absolutely awful to play, you will constantly find yourself accidentally shifting into reverse or drive when you don’t mean to, simply because you are getting ahead of the game. The first time I sat down to play this game, with friends we were failing much too often simply because of how much time we were wasting trying to figure out how to drive the car. The best control scheme makes the game control more like those top down driving games, which I know are not universally loved (since you are turning based on the direction the car is facing and not how it is in relation to the screen), but gives you back control of the gas and brake button so you just feel more in control of what you are doing. Its possible the controls were wonky on purpose to add to the game’s sensibilities, but unless I am playing a game where the sole design is bad controls, I probably don’t want to get frustrated that the controls are stopping me from achieving what I want.

Let’s see what am I forgetting, The characters you pick from look like castoffs from the muppets, allowing you to change from a few selections, and adjust their color. There isn’t much personalization here, and only one character can be unlocked upon beating the game, but they don’t add anything new, so there is that. Once every 10 or so levels, there is a obstacle course level where you need to knock down bowling pins or pick up garbage during a set time limit. These levels are… fine, and usually the most difficult ones to get 3 stars on, but they happen far enough between that it’s not something that grows too frustrating. There are even party minigames, but I sadly never got to play them, I bet they are decent.

I started this review talking about Overcooked and I’ll end it the same way. Despite some issues I have with Overcooked, it set the standard for these 4 player hectic games, that I don’t think a lot of games will be able to touch. While there was certainly a lot of yelling and high stress in Overcooked, there was always a driving force that made you believe that you were learning and getting better, all while getting excited about what further levels might surprise you with at what crazy thing was coming next. Very Very Valet is a fun multiplayer game that can offer some hours of enjoyment but it never hits those peaks or comes close to what Overcooked was. It’s levels and obstacles aren’t as wacky, the strategy and execution you need is far less precise, and the drive to improve I never felt. When I would lose at a level, it wasn't because I felt I strategized wrong or needed to learn the level mechanics before getting a better score, it was because I would just lose track of a car. Even some levels I felt I was crap at, it didn't matter because I would get full marks simply by not failing a timer, so I never had desire to try those levels again and do better. However, I have to remind myself, that isn't the goal of this game. It doesn't have a high skill ceiling and it isn't trying to, its a game that you and a 10 year old over the holiday could sit and play together and both have fun with it. It won't replace their Minecraft, or Fortnight, and it won't replace your Billy Hatcher, or Bubsy 3d. Maybe Valet’s greatest strength will be as the training tool for my kids before I force them to be my Overcooked partners when that game does come up.

Is this the greatest game of all time?: No

Where does it rank: I need to stress that Very Very Valet is fine and fun, but it is a lot like eating fast food. You know that there is better food out in the world, both better tasting and better for you, but sometimes its ok to settle. No one is going to say Very Very Valet is their favorite game or even their favorite party game to play, but if you wanted to spend an afternoon playing the game, there are worse things out there. It's offensiveness and ease of play, its cooperative nature and gentle competitive style (who returned the most cars, etc.), could make it a fun family game night for the holidays. I have it ranked as the 108th Greatest Game of all time.

What's it Between: Very Very Valet sits between Peggle 2 (107th) and Mario Golf (109th).. It is a couple spaces below Moving out (103rd) which I do think is a better hectic co-op game, but not by much.

Anyone looking for it: here is the link to the list and more if you are interested in following along with me (this is not a self promotion).Here. I added links on the spreadsheet for quick navigation. Now if you missed a blog of a game you want to read about, you can get to it quickly, rather than having to scroll through my previous blogs wondering when it came up.

Thanks for listening