Everything is friend-shaped in Creature Kitchen

The last tentpole, AAA game I played was Resident Evil Requiem. I wrote a full walkthrough for it. Ryan wrote about how well the dual protagonists worked. Cass wrote about it leaning into its goofiness. I didn’t write an opinion piece about it and that’s mostly because I didn’t really have anything to say. I thought it was, at best, fine and, at worst, lazy, padded, and unnecessary.

Part of me worried that I was just too grumpy, cynical, or burned out (or some combination of the three). But I was also pretty sure that, especially among the recent Residents Evil, Requiem was, as the kids say, mid. And then Second Wind put out a whole video about exactly what I was feeling.

Truth be told, Requiem kind of took all the wind out of my gaming sails. I poked at other games — I am still trying to decide if All Will Fall is great or infuriating, Flotsam is great fun (until everyone dies), and I’m still fascinated by HumanitZ — but I just wasn’t feeling it.

We’ve kind of stumbled onto an unofficial theme week here at Rogue lately — Cass wrote about it, our Freelance Friday was about it, and here I was feeling it. Namely, that feeling is “big, expensive AAA games are kind of shit.”

And then I replayed Bastion for our members-only Rogue Remembers series. My reignited love for that 15 year old game made me poke around my Steam library for something else small and fun and artful that might make me feel something again.

I don’t remember buying Creature Kitchen. I suspect it just popped up as a recommendation and it looked neat enough that I added it to my cart. On a whim last night, I booted it up and was immediately smitten.

Creature Kitchen is a silly and simple premise for a game — you make friends with the various critters and cryptids around your cabin by cooking them meals. Finding the recipes and ingredients hidden around your cabin turns it into a puzzle game in a really fun way. It’s a silly, simple little game and I absolutely love it.

Creature Kitchen is not swinging for the fences. It’s a small game with a well-defined premise. It sticks to its story and doesn’t overstay its welcome. But that simplicity also lets it explore its idea fully without ever losing the plot. There are secrets and Easter eggs everywhere, and it’s one of the few games I’ve ever gone back to so I could 100% the achievements.

The graphics are deep-fried and janky. The creatures are weird and endearing little guys — more than once, I audibly gasped when a new one showed up. It’s funny. It’s sweet. It’s engaging. And it’s perfect.

It’s also exactly what I needed.

Creature Kitchen was made by a four person team called The Rat Zone. First, their website is perfect, but hidden between the gifs and absurdism is a profound message (spelling and grammar is theirs, but utterly forgivable because they’re just rats after all):

“Too often it seems that games try to be Good. There is nothing wrong with this, except it's completely wrong and bad advice for Game Development. Fuck That!!! You think we have time for that? How about instead of trying to be Good At Things all the time, we simply acknowlege we Suck Ass at some things, and that's okay. After all, we are making video games, and that is hard enough - if need to choose Bad but Interesting or Good but Boring, Bad but Interesting is probably more good probably. Besides, the Bad can be funny sometimes, or if it seems intenitionel then nobody care…”

Creature Kitchen is a three-hour game with super simple puzzles, more than a few laugh-out-loud moments, absolutely amazing little guy designs, and more heart than games 100 times its size and budget. It’s not perfect, but it never had to be. It only had to be interesting and genuine.

It’s the perfect reminder that pointless silliness is its own reward and just so happens to be the antidote to the endless deluge of soulless slop.