I booted up Creature Kitchen with a little trepidation. The small indie cooking sim from The Rat Zone is framed as a “creepy-cozy cooking simulator” and I don’t usually do well with spooky stuff. Even if it’s cozy. In truth, this game might have some slightly unsettling moments, but it’s far from a horror game. What immediately struck me about Creature Kitchen is its immaculate atmosphere. You start in the woods surrounded by fireflies, and then the beautiful soundtrack begins to draw you in.
An orb leads you through the woods towards a small cabin. There’s a note on the fridge from your aunt, telling you to please look after the creatures that will slowly make themselves known to you in the coming hours. It’s cryptic and creepy, but still no jump scares. The atmosphere is already moving from creepy to cozy. It’s perpetually night in Creature Kitchen, which infuses the entire experience with a whimsical, dream-like quality. This game has vibes.
It’s not a cooking simulator in the purist sense. There are no overly complicated recipes here, and you won’t be virtually flipping burgers for several hours to appease mindless NPCs who walk through the door either. There are some excellent cooking sims out there, but Creature Kitchen uses the concept of a cooking sim as the foundation for a sweet, succinct story.
Time To Start Prepping
Creature Kitchen is a puzzle game as much as it is a cooking sim. You’ll need to find creatures, take pictures of them, and then prepare meals for them. Certain meals require recipes, and these are often hidden in cupboards, in locked drawers, or found by completing simple yet satisfying puzzles. A couple of them are a little trickier, but there’s nothing here that will have you banging your head against the desk in frustration. Creature Kitchen isn’t that sort of game.
Except the clock puzzle. I hate the clock puzzle.
All your meals are prepared inside the “void of creation”, ie, the oven. You slice bread, chop tomatoes, mix flour and salt to make dough, and slowly build a repertoire of increasingly complicated meals to satisfy the weird denizens of your new abode. These include a frog that sprints around on two legs, an invisible creature in the pantry, and a mysterious creature called Pants (literally a pair of pants) who knocks on the door occasionally asking for food.
As you feed the animals, they start to inhabit your world, and the creepiness of the isolated cabin in the woods slowly becomes more cozy as the creatures fill in the gaps and create life around the place. The trash cat raccoon sits on the deck chair on the porch, for example, and will only scarper if you stand right on top of it.
As you fill out the recipe list and satisfy more of the weird creatures in and around the cabin, a story of loss and belonging slowly forms. No spoilers here, because it’s such a succinct experience that it’s worth checking out yourself. Your mysterious benefactor leaves increasingly cryptic messages, and when you finally understand what has happened, the game ends, and you’re left sitting there in the warm embrace of the most bizarre family of creatures you could imagine.
Creature Kitchen is short and sweet, with great vibes and a pleasant aesthetic. It’s funny, odd, and satisfying. I played the entire thing in one sitting and then loaded it up again to 100 percent the game, cooking every dish and collecting every recipe. All in all, it was around four hours of play. I love little games like these.
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You’re looking for a new cooking game to really sink your teeth into? Heard, chef.
