Even in our era of accelerating electric woe, there’s a timeless comfort to be found in the simple act of cooking for a friend. The fulfilment of providing that basic hospitality is what developer The Rat Zone is trying to capture in Creature Kitchen, a laid-back cooking sim that released on Steam last week: It’s just you, the ingredients scattered around your inscrutable woodland home, the yawning cosmic void contained within your oven, and the unsated hungers of the night creatures answering the call of the culinary witching hour.
Okay, so it’s not exactly the conventional image of neighborly camaraderie, but still—people seem to like it! At time of writing, 99% of Creature Kitchen’s 707 reviews on Steam have been positive since its February 6 launch, leaving it with an impressive Overwhelmingly Positive rating. And that’s even accounting for the legged, mouthless egg-being!
Oh, I should note: There’s a legged, mouthless egg-being. In addition to satisfying the food cravings of more mundane forest critters like crows, toads, and sandwich-hungry raccoons, Creature Kitchen also has you play host for a collection of unsettling cryptids.
And the trees whisper. And there are lights in the woods. There are meal recipes hidden beneath sigils, there are glyph-based puzzles in the cabinets, and there’s an unfathomable engine installed in the bathtub. And, again, there’s outer space in the oven.
If you’re struggling to make sense of all that, I don’t know what to tell you. I just flip the eggs and make toast. All that Lynchian stuff is above my pay grade. But if you’re interested in picking apart its mysteries for yourself, reviewers say it’ll only take you a couple hours—and by all accounts, enjoying the throwback art style and easygoing (if eerie) atmosphere along the way is well worth the $8 price tag. That’s a small price to pay for the joy of feeding a friendly face. Even if it doesn’t have a mouth.
Creature Kitchen is available on Steam now.
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