Card stacking meets cooking in Arvis Games’s recent dish: Sizzle & Stack. Heavily inspired by Stacklands, Sizzle & Stack is a world where everything, from the rolling pin to a single egg, is a card. Hungry customers line up to try your latest recipes. If you can’t meet their satisfaction by the end of the day, your run is over, and you must start over.

Sounds hard? It certainly can be, but Sizzle & Stack has different difficulties for varied playstyles: Cozy Mode (no customer satisfaction requirement) and Hardcore Mode (no pause button). As someone that prefers more relaxed, low-consequence time management games, I found their Default difficulty to combine challenge and chill pretty well. But if you’re looking for the fast-paced, high stakes environment of a big shot kitchen, Sizzle & Stack also has a table ready for you.

Order Up!

The cooking mechanics are simple: everything is a card, so you stack cards to cook recipes. Want a fried egg? Place the egg card on top of the pan card. A customer is hankering for a bun? Time to stack some milk and flour for some dough, then toss that thing onto a pan card.

As your chef skills evolve, you will learn more complex recipes from around the world. This means more ingredients, and many, many more steps for each recipe. While you start out with just a pan card, you’ll soon also get a knife, oven, rolling pin, and whatever else you need for a fully stocked kitchen. These appliances and tools can be upgraded to be faster as you progress, and I found that these upgrades were available early enough in the game to help speed up my progress at the right time.

Here’s a fun Italian example: A customer orders pasta pomodoro, but first you need some raw spaghetti. But wait—before you can make raw spaghetti, you of course need to whip up some pasta dough. And pasta dough, of course, requires plain, simple dough. 

This kind of complexity is common the more you progress in the game, and it helps the player stay engaged in the repetitive gameplay. Once you start memorizing the simpler recipes, you’ll be multitasking recipes like a chef straight out of The Bear.

In This Economy?

Starting out, you only have access to basic ingredients: eggs, flour, sugar, milk, and cheese. These “Pantry” ingredients allow you to make a limited amount of breakfast foods. Though simple, breakfast food is often enough to attract hungry customers.

Now, about buying ingredients…it feels like gambling. Imagine if you go to the grocery store, but instead of being able to pick out what you want, the store sells you a mystery box. Whatever is in the box was what you get, and if you’re still missing an ingredient you need, you have to buy a whole new box. You could blow your entire savings on boxes just to get one bag of sugar. It’s happened to me.

Such is the nature of buying ingredients in Sizzle & Stack. Later on in the game, you can buy a market, a card that stays on your table as a mini storefront. This allows you to buy specific ingredients of that store type. So, the Pantry Market sells pantry ingredients. But these ingredients cost more, and by the time you unlock the Pantry Market, your recipes don’t really consist of Pantry products anymore. 

It’s still nice that it exists, but I had to endure the frustration of the mystery packets for a long while before I unlocked the Pantry Market. I would prefer it if the market was already available in the beginning of the run, with the packets available as a cheap, risky way to shop (for all you lovely gamblers out there).

Hoarding Intolerance

If I can overshare for a second here, I am definitely the kind of person that hoards crap I don’t need just in case I might need it one day. This clutter-causing habit leaks into my video game life too: I struggle to sell or throw away even the most useless of items. In the Sizzle & Stack world, I feel the temptation to keep a lengthy stack of eggs and milk on hand at all times, no matter how much room it takes up. 

But Sizzle & Stack put a gentle hand on my shoulder and said, “Absolutely not.” Then handed me a trash bag.

Sizzle & Stack has a strict table limit, meaning you can only carry a certain number of cards to the next day. In the beginning, the limit is pretty severe, but upgrades are cheap enough to buy regularly. These table upgrades physically expand the size of the table and increase the card limit. You can also buy Cupboards to stack your cards on, which shields them from counting towards the table limit.

I actually liked this aspect of Sizzle & Stack. Although having to sell so many cards at once could be annoying at times, it added an interesting challenge. I had to strategize when I bought packs of cards, considering the time of day and how badly I needed to attend to certain orders.

For example, if a recipe called for a rarer ingredient and it was the end of the day, it would be smarter to save the order for the next day instead of buying pack upon pack of cards in hopes of getting the rare card. Buying a ton of cards last minute would mean I’d have potentially dozens of unwanted cards on the table. I would just have to sell them all, losing money in the long run.

Health Code Violations

Another incentive to sell cards at the end of the day is the garbage. Cards will turn into Garbage cards at some point, which you have to stack onto a Garbage Bin card. The Garbage Bin card will consume the garbage card after a duration of time, so ridding yourself of a bunch of Garbage cards takes a while. If you pile up too many Garbage cards, you’ll soon find a red angry health insurance card on your table, giving you a number of days to either get rid of the garbage cards, or pay a hefty health insurance fee. 

At first I was conflicted about both the table limit and the garbage cards. But as I said, this handicap took away my hoarding crutch. I had to be smart with my spending, or pay the dreaded bills.

Eating Cash

Speaking of dreaded bills…you have to pay rent, even in Cozy mode. Rent is just as crippling in the game as it is in the real world. Maybe I’m exaggerating, but my little restaurant fell on hard times more than once because of how hard rent ate my money.

It doesn’t matter how smart I try to be with my money. Again, the shopping system is gambling. You’re not guaranteed the ingredient you need when you buy a pack. 

Say I have three customers, and all three of them have orders that require me to buy an ingredient. The kicker is, I only have five bucks left, because it’s the day after rent was due. First, I need to decide which order to prioritize by A) which will pay more, and B) which would be easier to make with what I have/what I can buy. Then, I can buy a pack and hope to the cooking gods that I’m blessed with the card I need. 

On top of that, the dishes really don’t pay that much (you’re really after the satisfaction point the customer will give you, which allows you to pass the day). So you’re still surviving by the skin of your teeth with what meager earnings you can squeeze out of your customers.

You can technically give your customers dishes they didn’t ask for to get rid of them, but this decreases the customer satisfaction. Plus, there’s no guarantee that the next customer will have an easier order than the first.

Also keep in mind the day is passing by this whole time. In Cozy and Default mode, there is a pause button (thank God). But still, there’s a few seconds you must wait for dishes to cook. If the day ends before you can satisfy a certain number of customers, that’s it. Run over. Restaurant dead. Career ruined. If you’re in Hardcore mode with no pause button, your time strategizing and buying wastes all those precious seconds you have to keep your business afloat. 

I get it. A lot of business management games involve rent in some way. But just my two cents: if the rent literally eats almost your entire savings, AND the player is largely restricted to a gambling-based shopping system, AND they’re playing in normal or easy mode, the rent is too much. 

The Grind

There was a point when I had to wonder, am I still grinding towards a goal, or is the gameplay just repetition until I kill my run and am forced to start over? During the majority of a run, you’re trying to work up towards unlocking all of the different kinds of cuisines. This might take a bit if your run ends before you get there. 

Once you unlock them all, the game has ”Sizzle Medals” and “Signatures” to work towards. Signatures are upgrades that you can start a run with. Not going to lie, I usually quit my runs before this point, lest madness set in. 

Sizzle & Stack is not the first to have card stacking gameplay (again, see Stacklands), but spending hours stacking cards over and over again wears at the psyche. It’s lovely as a game to play for 15-30 minutes to unwind, so I’m glad the Cozy mode exists. For longer game sessions aimed at improving runs, the gameplay gets repetitive (and, at times, tedious) fast.

Kitchen Heat

If you’re considering this game, keep in mind that Sizzle & Stack is all about runs. Unless you’re in Cozy mode, the goal is to keep the restaurant open for as long as you can. As soon as you fail to meet customer satisfaction, the run ends, and back to the beginning you go.

The devs say this about Sizzle & Stack: “Whether you’re just here to unwind and whip up some quick dishes or you love finding clever combos and optimizing every move, Sizzle & Stack fits your vibe. Play a short day, go all-in on a long shift, or kick back in peaceful mode—it’s your kitchen, so run it your way.”

Mostly, I agree with this. I spent some chill evenings in a Discord call stacking cards while chatting with friends. Since the pause button is my bestest friend, I usually wasn’t concerned about losing the run.

But keeping up with rent and customer satisfaction sneaks up on you, and that’s where the challenging bit comes in. And obviously, the Hardcore mode take away my beloved pause button. My lovely friends that enjoy stacking cards with the speed and intensity of a soldier under fire will probably find this game more enjoyable than the chill gamers do.

Should You Buy?

I finished one run in a little over two hours. That was on Default mode, where you get the pause button. Another run without the pause button would go by much faster. This is something to think about if you’re considering this game, which is $9.99 on Steam. If you love grinding ‘til 100%, the $10 price tag might be worth it. If you’re like me and are a one-and-done runner, $10 for 2 hours might look a little steep. This game is definitely aimed at the former crowd, so if that’s you, I would definitely check this game out! 

Sizzle & Stack is developed by Arvis Games and is available to purchase on Steam.

NeverMore Niche received a free review key from KeyMailer.