Thanks for all your detailed feedback! Understand and agree with most of what you've written here. I wanted to try something in the space of the botw cooking system but agree the required nature of the progression loop means it's confusing how you're supposed to progress if you don't stumble upon the perfect combination of ingredients to get what you need. I'll keep iterating on it - the goal is to have a cooking system that retains some level of discovery and creativity if possible. Combat definitely isn't where I'd want it to be in a full product either. I think the tradeoffs of temporary buffs and permanent progression was a good learning for me in this prototype. I think the majority of the buffs should be permanent if I can figure out how to pace the game around that, with occasional temporary buffs for flavor - that mightalso help with backtracking issues. Cooking gear upgrades sound great to me!
Story is definitely something I do expect to add if I start working on a fuller version of this game, so excited to get to that point :)