In "Holy Potatoes?! What the Hell?!", you are a dead anthropomorphic potato. A chef in life, you arrive in Hell as sous-chef for a restaurant making potato-based meals for the gods. The gameplay involves sorting potato people into appliances to be processed into ingredients, which are used to cook meals for visiting gods. Every serving day has three phases. Prep gives you a chance to stock up on ingredients and meals before the orders come in during the other phases; Lunch and Supper, both of which play the same.
Each appliance corresponds to one of four basic sins: Malice, Pride, Greed, or Apathy which are colour coded. It's not just a case of placing against the correct colour because each appliance has traits. You might be given one that gives better ingredients if the range falls between 40-60, and has a max of 80. So even if it is the correct colour, a value of 90 is no good for this appliance. You can purchase and replace appliances, and can have more than one of the same colour. So you might have one that produces higher quality ingredients with 40-60, and another that does so >70.
Appliances have a certain number of potatoes they can process before breaking. Once broken, you click the repair icon and wait a while for the machine to be restored.
Later on, a few new mechanics are introduced. If the total sins are less than 200, then the potato is deemed innocent. You can either process them as normal, or hit the “Send to heaven” button for a small reward of “Favour” and money. There is also a “wanted” potato to look out for, with a reward for finding them, and a punishment if you process them.
Sinners come one at a time, and you cannot move on until you sort the one you have (cannot discard or skip). You can sort them into an appliance station, but that can mean being locked out of a better ingredient for several seconds whilst the current one is processed. You can process new sinners as you cook for the gods, and can initiate actions when the game is paused.
Processing each sinner takes a few seconds and can produce ok/good/epic versions of its ingredient. The main types of ingredients are baked, mashed, boiled, and fried. Since they are all potatoes and you are just looking at icons, it's quite hard to differentiate what you want. In other games that might have Food, Wood, Stone, Gold, it’s easy to glance at the costs and think “I need 50 more wood”. Here, I often thought to myself "I need another potato for that meal...wait, what? which one?"
Later, you are introduced to more ingredients: salt, pepper, chilli peppers, and honey which can be produced from your normal appliances if you hit a certain criteria, or there’s a dedicated appliance which produces only 1 resource.
More recipes are unlocked when you reach the next batch of stages called a "circle" (a reference to Dante's Nine Circles of Hell). You can also research a couple of new ones, which is as simple as clicking and waiting for several seconds. You have to research as soon as possible just in case a request comes in for them. The "research" idea seemed a throwaway and pointless mechanic. Only your stockpile of ingredients, meals and recipes carry over from one Circle to the next. Appliances will be reset to a basic set, as well as Favor which is the currency to buy them.
Cooking involves selecting the oven and choosing a recipe, then waiting for the required seconds. At first, you can only cook one thing, but later upgrade your oven to two slots. Requests from the gods are for specific recipes, specific ingredients, a minimum grade, or a specific recipe with a specific minimum grade. Fulfil a request, and the gods will then award Favor. Fail to serve a dish that matches the request in time, and Favor is penalised.
Levels have a target of Favor to reach, or to complete a certain number of meals. Since appliances cost Favor, you need to be careful not to spend too much.
Sometimes, a single God can ask for 4 of the same item, and when there are up to 4 gods and they all can ask for 4, it means you can have up to 16 food orders at once but you can only cook 2 meals at a time. That's also a lot of ingredients it is using so your stock can quickly deplete. Sometimes I wondered if intentionally failing orders was the way forward. Fulfilling orders quickly isn’t always beneficial because they will just put another order in after a few seconds.
The currency Starch can be used to spend in a shop between chapters. There’s various power-ups, one was to speed up cooking times which I always used towards the end of the game. One type which is extremely useful in the first half of the game are "toppings" that can boost the overall grade of a dish right before you serve it. At first this is a way of making up for poor quality potato ingredients, but in one circle, the gods start requesting grades above the maximum for that dish. So the max might be A, but they ask for an S rank of that dish, therefore the topping is mandatory.
One rarely used feature for me was to turn unused dishes into drinks. This refills the time gauge for a God. If you give them a few drinks, they can then forget the order in their drunken state.
There’s a few random events where a sinner will appeal to you to be spared and to work alongside you in the kitchen. Say yes, and you will get either a buff or a debuff, although soon you can also get a debuff for saying no. I wasn’t sure if there was a way of telling which option was good. It was a minor inconvenience anyway, so I usually just rejected them all. Starting in the third Circle, “global events” will affect the sin scores of incoming sinners for the duration of an objective but I didn’t think it made much difference to each level anyway.
There’s a cookoff mini-game in between chapters. There’s 2 dishes you need to cook, with the three guest judges scoring the dishes. These scores are based on ingredient quality and if they fit with the judges' preferences for that mealtime which are shown to you before you choose your dish. The only other way you can have an impact is if you click on your pet when he faces the opponent. It will then charge at him and lower their score. You can hurt yourself though if you don’t time it right.
The dialogue is full of potato puns, and some characters are parodies of celebrities just like the other Holy Potato games. There's a few returning characters like Darth Tater, and some celebrity chefs like Gordan Yamsey (Gordon Ramsey).
I really enjoyed “We’re In Space” and “A Weapons Shop”, but this one isn’t as interesting or addictive. It’s just a simple sorting game but the mechanics that are introduced don’t have a large enough impact on the gameplay. The game is overly long (~22 hours) and the gameplay isn't engaging enough to justify it. It gets really old fast, constantly sorting and churning out ingredients, and fulfilling orders. There's obviously a bit of strategy and you need to keep an eye on your resources and prioritise accordingly, but it's a bit limited and drawn out for longer than necessary.