Cooking in real life can be just as enjoyable as eating what you’ve made. Choosing ingredients, stirring, chopping, minding temperature — all the things you have to keep in mind to make a good meal also make it fun. But for all the games that feature cooking mechanics, from life sims to RPGs, few focus on the task itself in gameplay. One of the best demos in this round of Steam Next Fest picks up the torch from Cooking Mama, adding some interesting restaurant management and competition elements to its culinary core.
In KuloNiku: Bowl Up, you’ve inherited your grandmother’s restaurant, known for its meatballs and noodles, and it’s your job to make it better than ever. That involves serving customers, getting to know your neighbors, and even entering televised cooking competitions to improve your shop’s reputation.
You spend most of the demo at your restaurant, Bakuso, cooking simple meatball dishes. Throughout the day, customers will make an order, offer with notes on how to make it to their liking, an you need to walk through the cooking step by step. Making a simple noodle bowl means dropping meatballs and noodles into a hotpot to cook, adding seasonings to adjust the taste, and serving it. Later, you’ll have to chop and saute other ingredients, ramping up the complexity of the cooking process over time.
Dishes aren’t one size fits all either. Customers have preferences for how salty, sweet, and sour they like their food, and specific ingredients they love or hate. Learning how to balance their desires with what you have on hand makes every dish a fun little puzzle to solve.
At the outset of the demo, you’re introduced to rival chef Stella and your best friend Cassie, getting an early glimpse at how much KuloNiku emphasizes characters as much as cooking. KuloNiku’s characters add a lot of life to the game, and even their insistence of constantly making cheesy food-based puns makes them more charming. In that way, KuloNiku reminds me a bit of another great shopkeeping sim, Potionomics. Both games benefit from making their customers characters you can have actual relationships with rather than nameless NPCs who only exist to buy your goods. There are even hints of romance with some characters in the demo.
The most surprising part of my time with KuloNiku was the cooking competitions. Twice a week, you can enter a culinary duel that feels like a turn-based RPG mixed with the Iron Chef TV show. A judge, or a panel of judges, sets out their rules for the meal you’re to cook for them, and you have a limited number of action points you use to cook and add seasonings. The competition’s viewers also have ideas of what they want to see, and you’ll earn points for how well you meet the demands of the judges and audience members alike. The competitions are a bit tougher to grasp at the start than standard cooking, but they’re an interesting way to break up the daily grind and put your skills to the test.
Do well as a competitor and restaurateur and you’ll earn both money and reputation to expand your shop. What starts as a bare counter-serve establishment can grow into a thriving restaurant, giving you a chance to decorate to your heart’s content.
KuloNiku: Bowl Up might not be doing anything you haven’t seen some version of in another game before, but the unique way it blends all these ingredients together makes it a rare treat. Even as a fan of management sims generally, their single-minded focus on productivity can eventually turn them into a chore. KuloNiku seems primed to avoid that by adding so much to do outside your kitchen and I’m eager to see how the full version pans out.
