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I Played Paula Deen's Mobile Game and All I Got Was This Zesty Salad

At least I got a decent lunch out of this free-to-play celebrity game.
Photo: Emanuel Maiberg

​I played Paula Deen's mobile game and I'm here to tell you that it is not good at all but that I got a pretty tasty recipe out of it.

Paula Deen's Recipe ​Quest is a free-to-play mobile game, meaning you can download and start playing for free, but that it will very quickly ask you for money to continue playing at your own pace.

If you've played Candy Crush Saga, you've played a much better version of Paula Deen's Recipe Quest, as they're essentially the same game. There's a world map, which in Paula Deen's Recipe Quest features a haunting cartoon Paula Deen avatar that moves from stage to stage. In each stage, you're presented with a grid of cooking ingredients, assuming you consider a glazed ham an ingredient.

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When you match three ingredients of the same type by pulling one in any direction, the matching set disappears, causing the items above to cascade, which then allows you to match another three items. Sometimes you're trying to match specific items in a limited number of moves, but you're always dragging and matching.

This is not a fun thing to do. I think we should all be ashamed about that one year where every man, woman, and child on the bus was playing Candy Crush Saga in public, but I've at least heard the developers at King responsible for that game wax poetic about how they carefully considered the shape, color, and sheen of every candy. You hear them describe the pacing and audio/visual stimuli that convince people to spend hundreds of dollars on less than nothing and you can appreciate the evil science involved in the same way that you can appreciate an AH-64 Apache attack helicopter, even if you're not crazy about its intended purpose.

Paula Deen's Recipe Quest is bad even at the bad thing it's trying to do. It takes only 15 minutes to play through a handful of levels before it asks you to wait or buy (as in with real money) more in-game currency—cookies—that you can use to cut through the wait time.

Mini-Paula teaching me how to play. Credit: Paula Deen's Recipe Quest

I didn't want to play more levels. Moving candies into place in Candy Crush feels good. When you do it right the game, it pushes every button in your brain to make you feel like a winner, just like a well-designed slot machine. In Paula Deen's Recipe Quest, everything feels clunky, slow, and unsatisfying, and when you finish a level, Deen croaks out a slow, ominous laugh that sounds like something out of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

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This appears to be intentional? Check out this psychotic trailer for the game, which features a insane-looking Paula Deen:

I'm scared.

Yeah, it's creepy.

My guess is that Paula Deen's Recipe Quest exists because she lost her Food Network contract in 2013 during a lawsuit that accused her of racial discrimination (and she did admit to dropping the N-bomb o​n occasion) and that—following Kim Kardashian's lead—free-to-play mobile games is one new way celebrities monetize their name recognition these days.

Kardashian has one, Li​ndsay Lohan has one, and earlier this month, Animoca Brands announced that it signed a deal to license the name and image of Paris Hi​lton for use in mobile apps, so get pumped for that.

It seems that Kim Kardashian: Hollywood is the only redeemable game in the bunch, but Paula Deen's Recipe Quest does have one clever feature. Whenever you beat a level you unlock a Paula Deen recipe, which is really just a link to Paula Deen​'s website.

I unlocked recipes for Not Yo Mama's Banana Pudding, Cheeseburger Casserole, and others before I hit the game's aggressive monetization methods, but I was recovering from a weekend bacchanal of pizza and Mexican food, and went for the only healthy option on offer: Aunt Peggy's Zesty Cucumber Salad.

Free-to-play mobile games is one new way celebrities monetize their name recognition these days

Paula Deen's site tries to upsell you on what I'm sure is an antics-filled premium video in which Deen shows you how to make the salad. I didn't pay for the video, but the recipe itself is generou​sly free. Here are the ingredients:

  • 3 tablespoons white wine vinegar
  • 2 tablespoons olive oil
  • 1 teaspoon sugar
  • 3 cucumbers, peeled and thinly sliced (about 2 lbs)
  • 1 (10 oz) container grape tomatoes, sliced in half
  • 1/2 medium Vidalia onion, very thinly sliced into half moons
  • 2 tablespoons dill, chopped
  • kosher salt, to taste
  • black pepper, freshly ground, to taste

I used a quarter-teaspoon of sugar instead of a full teaspoon because I'm not a goddamned baby that needs everything to be sweet and a yellow onion instead of a Vidalia onion because I don't know what a Vidalia onion is. Otherwise, I followed the recipe, which is to cut the above ingredients and mix them in a bowl.

My conclusion is that Paula Deen's Recipe Quest is a very bad and potentially frightening game, but the food was good. If the game leads a few more people to Deen's website it's not a complete wash.

I could do without the sugar, but the salad was delish and zesty as the name promises, so kudos to Paula Deen and Aunt Peggy.