This game, for the first few times I played it--very very stressful. I cannot keep anybody's orders straight for the life of me. This is unquestionably a skill issue, but it does mean my ability in this game probably caps out pretty quickly, if I try to purely memorize the customers' orders.
But then I realized something. I don't have to memorize them. I can just put the ticket for each customer right in front of them to keep track! And this helped tremendously. Although, I also switched to the post-jam version at the same time as I tried this strategy, but in any case it more than doubled my score instantly. (My high score is now $162.85).
Once playing with a real strategy, I think this game really starts to come together. I found that customers would often inexplicably leave even as I was about to give them their food, but that I often was able to re-use their meal for a future customer. It seems like if I could somehow prepare a bunch of coffee, soda, fruit, and soup ahead of time, I would be able to do better, as those steps take by far the longest. I suppose high level play must involve always scheduling something to be cooking on the soup machine, because if there's any downtime you've probably already lost a customer.
But the jank and frustration with the infernal customers seems to be the point. The fact that they throw their tickets randomly, making it possible to lose track of their orders before you even see them; that they seem to be absurdly impatient at times; that they won't let you just gently set down a tray, then the food on the tray, and will actively interrupt your attempts to do so--these things are all hilarious.
The sandbox nature of the game is also really effective. As I said, the only hope I had to even do decently at the game was to make use of the tools it gives me and actually place the tickets down in a meaningful place. I think you could develop additional strategies, such as organizing some food/utensils ahead of time so that they were easily accessible. (I found that most of the time when I tried to organize food ahead of time, I would end up with a stack of objects where trying to pick anything up sent everything else flying and it may have cost more time than it saved).
I think the music in the post jam version really does a lot. It is cheerful enough to make it feel, like, not my fault that I am so bad. :)
I do think that the way the food slides along the tray is a bit weird. It seems like the tray will try to snap it back to where it should be, but that it still lags behind? This definitely makes it feel more precarious than it perhaps should be... like, it seems like the game wants me to not just drop my food, because it does snap it to the tray, but then the snap is done in this weird way.
One possible (?) bug I found in the non-post-jam version (no idea about post-jam): on the first run, literally every customer ordered "soda burger." I thought this was actually intentional--that it would be like this in every run, that no customer would ever order anything else. Seemed like a pretty funny joke--you make an entire functional restaurant for the jam but then make the customers only ever order 1 of the 18 possible two-item combos. Having seen customers order other things, it seems this was likely a bug. Or just a very unlikely coincidence.
In terms of orders, there is an interesting luck-based element. In particular, any order with 2 of the items requiring the soup machine will necessarily take substantially longer than any order with only 1 soup machine item, and the orders with only burger/salad are very very fast comparatively. Based on looking at the code, it appears each of the 6 items is just chosen purely randomly, so for the most part the soup machine items should be pretty common due to being 4/6 of the items. But in theory, a very lucky run could get many burger/burger combinations and possibly have an outright unbeatable score without the same luck.
As such, I think a possible additional strategic element would be to service any of the faster orders first. This means at the very least you are getting the orders you can finish done very quickly. Although, I guess I am curious if you have found it possible to serve every customer on time in your runs.
The 3D assets look good, and the in-game buttons are a fun way to interact. I'm pretty sure this game would go very hard in VR--it feels a lot like a VR game with its focus on grabbing physics-based objects and with the in-game huge buttons you have to push.
Overall, definitely a hectic game, but quite funny & enjoyable, especially the post-jam version.