Chippy Is A Fish & Chip Shop Simulator For iOS That Puts The Fun Into Deep-Fat Frying

Simulation video games are often purposefully, gloriously mundane. But they can also make the quotidian highly entertaining. And that’s certainly true of this U.K.-made example of the genre. Meet: Chippy, a fish & chip shop simulator game for iOS that’s plenty of fun to play – partly because its subject matter is so spectacularly mundane (frying fish and chips), but also because it turns that mundane task into an addictive game of time management.

Firstly, for non-British TC readers, “chippy” is slang for a fish & chip shop – aka a staple of the British small-town high street, selling battered fish and fat-soaked chips. Traditionally, this comfort food would be served straight from the deep fat frier, wrapped up in yesterday’s newspaper, and drenched in salt and vinegar. It’s about as quintessentially British as a cup of tea.

Now to Chippy the game: The game-play involves memorising orders, and remembering the correct sequence in which to swipe items around the screen to make up each order. If you lose track and leave the chips/fish in the frier too long, they’ll start to blacken and burn, eventually giving off a plume of dense black smoke and being good for nothing but throwing in the trash.

Burnt food also attracts flies, which has a knock on effect on your hygiene rating. You can dispatch flies by throwing stuff at them individually or by activating a UV fly zapper on the wall of your shop to net the whole swarm. But pressing on that until all the flies are pulled to fiery death means you can’t be making up orders so risk falling behind and having angry customers storm out of the shop.

Chippy scores are reputational, based on customer satisfaction, factoring in things like speed/efficiency of order fulfilment, quality of the food (burnt or uncooked fish and chips won’t win you many points), and whether you got all the aspects of the order right or not.

The game eases you in with simple orders, and steadily introduces new elements to ramp up the complexity – so you move from making up a single portion of chips, to making multiple fish & chips portions, with or without salt & vinegar, at the same time and so on. There are also challenges going alongside the basic pipeline of orders. These appear on the newspaper you use to wrap the food, prompting you to ‘cook up three of everything before you open the shop’ or ‘knockout a fly by throwing something at it’.

For the rest of the time, the newspaper headlines are pure entertainment, plus a dash of humour – such as ‘Hipsters alarmed by choice in craft beers’. For a game focused on a single screen environment, there’s a lot of detail to enjoy.