Maybe I was hungry when I stumbled across I Can Only Speak Doner as it’s not the kind of game you’d usually see me gravitating to. It’s also possible that it was reflective of my experiences with one of my local kebab shops, my first experience with them being almost blow for blow what happens in the game. Either way it managed to charm me with the idea which is well executed but that’s about where the game’s development ends. To be sure there’s plenty of things to unlock but the core question I kept asking myself was why. With only the barest whispers of story to pull things together I really had no motivation to keep making doners which, given this genre’s reputation for telling genuinely compelling narratives with similar mechanical setups, feels like a missed opportunity.
The game gets you going with the premise pretty quickly: you’ve moved to foreign country to run your uncle’s doner shop. Trouble is he’s not exactly leaving it in a fit state so you’ll be starting from scratch, earning back all the things that a successful shop needs. The wrinkle here is that you don’t speak a lick of the local language and so you’re left on your own to figure out how to feed the hungry masses whilst ensuring you’ve got enough doner to make it through the day.
I Can Only Speak Doner starts off easy enough, given you only have a handful of options to choose from when it comes to fulfilling orders. As you roll through the days though you’ll unlock additional ingredients, side dishes, challenges and ancillary activities you engage in to extract even more dollars from your customers. Strictly speaking most of these things aren’t exactly necessary to the core game loop but doing them enables you to reduce the time between meaningful upgrades that even further reduce the time to get more.
Which makes the core game loop really solid as it’s got the right mix of complexity, risk/reward and management mechanics that make your choices meaningful. Go out and party to get lots of repeat customers? You won’t be able to understand their orders and you’ll run out of ingredients quickly. Focus on language? Sure you can take more orders without needing to wait for them to point things out, but you’re probably going to make more mistakes when you start blasting through orders faster with your new found confidence.
All of these things would be even better if the story didn’t stop after the base mechanics have been introduced. It’s not like there isn’t ample opportunity to include this either as all the upgrades could have some backstory attached to them, customers could have banter with you and even getting orders wrong provides an opportunity for a snarky comment back at you. Without it the drive to continue for another upgrade, more ingredients just seems hollow which is what had me putting it down so quickly.
So credit where it’s due: I Can Only Speak doner is strong on a mechanical and concept level. Where it falls down is in its unrealised potential; it’s currently a narrative blank canvas that has the opportunity to tell a great story. But today it doesn’t and that unfortunately had me bouncing off it much earlier than I otherwise would. Perhaps one day we’ll see a story content patch come through for it and, if that ever happens, expect to see me coming back.
Rating: 6.5/10
I Can Only Speak Doner is available on PC right now for $7.50. Total playtime was 0.7 hours.
