Ratatouille

Cooking clearly isn't easy. And seeing as we struggle to create the most basic of what could be loosely classed as meals, we can only imagine how tough it must be working in a restaurant kitchen. You only have to look at Gordon Ramsay's face to see the level of stress he's clearly under.

But at least he can actually cook. Well, we only ever see him slaughtering pigs named after posh TV presenters and smashing up crockery, but presumably he can knock up a tasty dish when the mood takes him.

Consider, then, the case of Ratatouille's lead character, Linguini, who's stuck in a kitchen armed with all the culinary prowess of a first-year university student. If you're unaware of the plot details surrounding Pixar's latest cinematic creation, Linguini pins all of his hopes on a rat who offers to give him instructions from a hiding place beneath his chef's hat. Which sounds like the reasoning of a desperate man to us. He could have just gone out and bought Delia's How To Cook.

This film premise has been translated into a mobile game using the most obvious idea: Ratatouille is a game about cooking. Orders from the restaurant pile up and you need to create them before the customer gets bored of waiting and storms out.

It would be quite a comprehensive and entertaining cookery game, too, if it wasn't for the most baffling tutorial and interface known to mobile gaming. We're used to mobile games being simple, and they usually benefit from this. But Ratatouille – especially seeing as its default buyers will be youngsters – is initially harder to negotiate than a tight rope made of dental floss.

We had to revisit the tutorial three times just because once you begin the game, the hints disappear, leaving you standing in a kitchen with nine work spaces, two hands and no idea of where to go first.

About ten minutes in, once the rules and controls become clear, the game does actually become enjoyable to play. But just try to fathom this out in a minute-long tutorial.

You begin each level pressing '7', which is the button number that corresponds to the order table. You therefore find orders there, and can choose to pick up one or two at a time. Linguini can carry two items so you need to specify whether to pick things up in your right or left hand.

You then take the order to area number '1', which is the 'staging area'. This is where you carry the various ingredients for the orders.
Orders are quite vague – you'll be asked to make a Nicoise salad and just have some fuzzy blobs which represent the ingredients needed. (Eventually, you learn what these are.)

Area '3' is the cold storage where you find eggs and meat, while '9' is the patisserie, which has bread and, oddly, vegetables. Some ingredients are ready to add to a dish immediately, but others need preparing. So vegetables need to be taken to areas '4' or '5' to be chopped, bread to area '8', which is the toaster, and eggs, meat and fish to stove area '2'.

All the while, you need to make sure you're picking things up and putting them down using the right hand, and into the right slot in that area. At the start, no one actually tells you that when an ingredient is highlighted red it means it needs preparing. And it took us a while to work out how to put items down that we didn't want anymore.

Annoyingly, and pointlessly, if you try to move to an area where another chef is standing, you're told you can't go there or they'll spot you. Or presumably, they'll spot the dirty great rat sitting on your head. You just have to wait until they move.

Despite all of this, Ratatouille does offer moments of being a neat little game. You can tackle orders simultaneously, which requires greater skill, memory and organisation. It's almost like real cooking – you put your eggs on to cook then go off and chop up your veg while they're cooking. And all under the pressure of a timer constantly ticking down on each order and occasional visiting food critic.

Just don't expect to be enthralled by it from the start. Indeed, you're more than likely to spend much of your first few attempts swearing like Gordon Ramsay.