Uncle Lee’s Cookbook: Five Recipes for Disaster review

• Reviews by Serena Nelson
• Published:

Collection of snack-sized, retro-styled comedy adventures has the right mix of ingredients

Crackpot inventors make for interesting tales, as often their creations tend to go horribly wrong, which can lead to plenty of hilarious hijinks. Certainly that’s true of the titular scientist in Uncle Lee’s Cookbook: Five Recipes for Disaster, a series of mostly standalone adventure games tied together into one more-or-less cohesive whole. Originally released as individual freeware games, they’ve now been collected and updated in this complete, fully voiced commercial bundle, and there’s plenty of fun to have as Uncle Lee keeps cooking up trouble for his niece Ines to set things right. While all five together are still a pretty short experience, any fan of retro-styled adventure games will want to check this one out. 

The game starts out with a prologue, which acts as the overarching tutorial chapter. Lee is getting ready to create his latest hodgepodge stew, and it’s up to you to dump random stuff into the pot. This neatly sets up the premise that he’s an eccentric who will work on creating any weird invention. The prologue is especially for those not already familiar with how a point-and-click adventure game works, as it walks players through inventory management and how to use items in the environment. It can be skipped by veteran gamers, but it lasts only a few minutes so I still recommend playing it just for fun.

Then we get to the meat and potatoes of Uncle Lee’s Cookbook. There are five tales of misadventure as Uncle Lee comes up with one insane idea after another at different periods in young Ines’s life. Most of the episodes involve him breaking reality, whether it’s during a family trip to the lake or at his poor niece’s twentieth birthday party. Episodes can be played in any order, and each is short enough to easily finish in a single sitting. Even the longest lasts at most an hour or so; the others can be finished in roughly half of that time. In all, it took me only about three hours to get through the whole collection. And yet despite their brevity, they all have something to offer the truly dedicated adventure game fan.

Episode one revolves around Uncle Lee somehow breaking quantum mechanics, leaving teenaged Ines to put together a device to restore order. Unfortunately, a Schrodinger’s cat situation pokes it head out, as any objects Lee closely observes get shunted off back to where they came from. This can be mildly irritating until the solution presents itself, as Ines first acquires and then needs to keep retrieving things that disappear from her possession a second, third time, and so on. The trick is to find a way to get the items to Uncle Lee without him actually knowing you’re doing it. Thankfully, there are only two screens to navigate so there’s literally no backtracking here.

Episode two is fun to play, about a ten-year-old Ines who just really needs to go to the bathroom. What I loved most about this one is the Game Boy green monochromatic graphics. It even has a catchy 8-bit soundtrack and sound effects one would expect from the classic handheld console. The problem for Ines here is that everything has gone awry once again thanks to Lee, turning him into an electric eel for some reason in the process. Upside-down rooms and a pink graphics filter that reveals hidden items help to differentiate the various areas of the house. It’s up to young Ines to fix the topsy-turvy nature of the house just so that the door to the bathroom can be reached and she can finally relieve herself.

Episode three sees Uncle Lee disrupt the space-time continuum, and it’s up to Ines to travel between four different time periods, including the 60s, 90s and the future. There is only one screen here, namely the van the two of them are using to travel for vacation. Lee has invented a reality-fixing device but it’s broken, so instead of changing locations, there’s a lot of hopping between each era as Ines tries to bypass obstacles and get it working again. Of particular note in this one is the music played by The Band (not to be confused with the real-world group by that name). They’ve recorded a demo tape that a huge fan of the group blocking your way to the back of the van would be eager to rock out to. 

Episode four has several screens, a first for Uncle Lee’s Cookbook. It’s Halloween, and Ines travels to her uncle’s town to work on a book while he’s away, but the townsfolk are all taking refuge in his house. They’re being haunted by three ghosts that Ines has to deal with to get some peace and quiet. There’s magic here, but Uncle Lee is adamant that magic is not real – though as we all know, any sufficiently advanced science can be indistinguishable from magic. Anyway, Ines will need to solve the town’s problems with a spellbook on an e-reader to get everything back to normal.

Finally, episode five brings a few characters from previous stories back together to celebrate Ines’s twentieth birthday. Of course, Uncle Lee gives Ines a birthday present that causes everything to go haywire yet again, creating a rift between timelines and universes. Frustrated, she now has to bend reality herself to get everyone back to the correct universe, but it’s fun using a special book created by Lee to change scenes and the rules of physics. These include Newton’s laws of motion, the laws of robotics, and even the laws of the Gremlins movies, among others. This is done by selecting two laws from another book and pasting in various pictures to change the appearance of the ever-shifting room. This one ties the other four tales together nicely and serves as a fitting capstone to the whole experience.

Uncle Lee’s Cookbook: Five Recipes for Disaster

Genre:	Comedy, Science Fiction
Presentation:	2D or 2.5D
Theme:	Paranormal, Magical, Other worlds/dimensions, Time travel
Perspective:	Third-Person
Graphic Style:	Pixel art
Gameplay:	Puzzle, Quest
Control:	Point-and-click
Game Length:	Short (1-5 hours)
Difficulty:	Low

Uncle Lee’s Cookbook is a simple one-click 2D pixel art adventure with very few rooms, totaling no more than a dozen across all five episodes, but developer Relatively Painless Games has shoved as much plot and as many puzzles into them as they could. The puzzles themselves are pretty simple to grasp, involving mostly inventory management (including item combinations) and speaking to Uncle Lee and other characters. Most of your tasks are pretty much spelled out at the beginning of each episode, and despite the wacky nature of the dilemmas Ines faces, the solutions for the most part are logical enough that they can be solved with a little thought and effort. 

There is a hint system that can be accessed via the inventory screen by clicking on the “to do” list (which acts as an objective checklist so you can see what needs to be done and what has been completed), and then on a question mark. Assistance is provided by a mysterious group of shadowy figures who don’t have voiced lines but can provide small or large hints. These hints start out small but you can ask for more detailed guidance until the biggest hints spell everything out for you. While this is always a nice option to have, I found most of the puzzles simple enough to solve them without it. I only used it once in the final episode to aid in discerning which rules to use from Uncle Lee’s book.

With the exception of the hint oracles, every character is fully voiced and done well. Uncle Lee has that old, mad scientist sound, and Ines (split between two actors, one for teenaged Ines and one for young Ines) convincingly conveys just how frustrated her uncle makes her. Supporting characters with smaller roles are fun to listen to as well. Members of The Band sound like hippies straight out of the sixties (which they are), and even the ghosts have that haunting sound one would expect from witches dating back to the eighteenth century. 

The music is catchy, particularly the chiptunes in episode two and the occasional rock songs played by The Band. Although more of a comedy-horror installment, I liked the way episode four was accompanied by haunting melodies you would expect from a more serious take on ghost stories. While the background music is pretty much played on loop, it never gets so repetitive that it detracts from what is going on in each scene. Sound effects also help add to immersion, like the underwater blurbs of electric eel Lee and the thunk of human Uncle Lee getting knocked out.

Hotspots can be highlighted by hitting the Tab key, but not all of them are interactive. There are plenty that just have a text description pop up when the cursor hovers over them. Fortunately there’s a distinction between these and the items you can pick up or manipulate, as the cursor for objects that can be interacted with have a sort of star pattern while the ones that are just for looking at have a cross shape, so you don’t need to click on everything to tell which is which. Don’t be in too much of a rush to skip over the optional descriptions, however, as some of them are hilarious.

The five tales of Uncle Lee’s Cookbook are full of insanity and crazy humor, even tossing a few bad puns into the mix, such as a story about one of the undead witches being “ghosted” by her love interest. In episode four, we find out that the town [REDACTED] has been at the center of a lawsuit, forcing its council to purge all mentions of its name. Some of the replacement names offered by Ines are clever, and getting the council members to agree is a fun puzzle in and of itself. And as one would expect from breaking time, space, and the laws of known science, there’s a lot of comedy to mine from it. I chuckled quite a bit at the absurdity of the situations Ines finds herself in, and anyone who loves a good reality-bending tale that messes with the universe should find lots to be amused by here.

Final Verdict

Though it’s tempting to binge everything all at once, Uncle Lee’s Cookbook: Five Recipes for Disaster is perfect for playing in short stints, with four of the five episodes lasting only about half an hour each at most. They’re so enjoyable that you’ll be left wanting more, so it’s a shame that this commercial release didn’t throw an additional one or two new episodes into the mix. Of the five that are here, you may prefer some episodes more than others, but there are a lot of crazy shenanigans going on in each as Uncle Lee concocts yet another catastrophe for his longsuffering niece to correct. Just seeing Ines exasperated by her uncle at every turn is worth the price of admission alone. The whole five-course meal may leave you feeling hungry again soon after you’re done, but it’s certainly a tasty treat while it lasts.

Serena played Uncle Lee’s Cookbook: Five Recipes for Disaster on PC using a review code provided by the game's publisher.

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