By Ronald Gordon

Ghost Town Game’s Overcooked was a warning: Cooking with friends is never an easy task and will often end in arguments. And burnt food. However, there could always be bigger problems than upset customers and lower star ratings, you could try cooking with friends while world-ending kaiju hover over your shoulders. 

Co-Op Kaiju Horror Cooking is, as the name suggests, a co-op cooking game in which you and several friends act as monks attempting to save the world, one chunk of (hopefully) un-burnt meat at a time! The uniqueness of this experience comes from the developer Strange Scaffold, who have made previous unusual games such as Clickholding and I Am Your Beast. But this is their first ever multiplayer experience. 

Kaiju Cooking is all about two things, finding food and surviving long enough to cook it right. There are currently four chapters, each of which features its own slew of unique Kaiju with their specific flavor preferences. Each level starts you off with a Chronicle, a piece of paper detailing the monster’s Loves, Likes, Dislikes, and Hates, which allows your group of monks to tailor your search towards what will grant you the most points. You’re then tasked with running into the Larder, a complex dungeon of rooms full of delicious ingredients and various enemies, in order to gather what the Kaiju favors and make it back outside. Feed them until you’ve racked up enough points and the level is complete. It’s then that your group of monks is allowed to go home without the world being ripped apart.  

One thing I can say for certain: this game captures the cooperative experience in its own way, and that’s a good thing! It has all the makings of your average quick co-op experience (lovingly dubbed Friend Slop games by a majority of the internet), but it doesn’t fall into the same hole of procedurally generated map layouts and scaling difficulty. Instead, Kaiju Cooking puts all the focus on its Kaiju and its narrative, giving players an interesting story to follow as you go along, detailing why you’re feeding these beasts and why you should care about the people within the world around you. The NPCs you encounter are all their own variant of intriguing, with the first one you’ll ever meet, a potion seller named Wilkin, standing outside of your bedroom door like a creep ready to greet you as the newcomer. The story expands as you go along. Deaths happen and the monastery mourns, people move around in their cave secluded temple and meander. To me, it feels a lot more homey than most other horror games out there. 

Yet, it’s still a horror game, and its tranquility is quickly thrown to the wayside when you’re staring at the glowing green skin of a very hungry, very destructive Kaiju. While their designs may be simple, I genuinely liked the look and feel of the Kaiju present in the game, as comedic as they might seem in their unmoving states. They’re simple glowing green monsters on the screen, but in game they’re also creatures who have to eat before they end up tearing apart the world from a hunger fueled madness. While the game might not have all the answers, I’d love to see some more info surrounding the Kaiju eventually. Why do some prefer garlic over salt? Why does one hate meat? Why does their skin glow the same green as a Mountain Dew Baja Blast? All questions are yet to be answered about these beautifully gleaming creatures, hopefully covered in a future update.  

Opting to utilize lower quality graphics helps create this familiar atmosphere around the game, bringing you back to classic dungeon crawlers like Bethesda’s Oblivion. The music has a funny way of displaying itself, almost absent at the start of the level only to appear and subsequently crescendo at the end of the level. As the Kaiju’s patience wears thin and the clock ticks short it begins thrumming with enthusiasm during the final minute, making the hunt for ingredients even more nerve wracking as gregorian chants and slow violins fill the ambience with haunting noise. 

Long name aside, Co-op Kaiju Horror Cooking is a wonderfully simple group experience, sidestepping normality with nuances toward story driven gameplay and moments that matter rather than being procedurally generated, almost infinitely loopable gameplay. If you’re in the mood for something that won’t have you starting over if your group fails and dies (or if you’d like to test your friend’s cooking skills outside of Overcook’s chaotic kitchens), I’d wholly suggest Kaiju Cooking. It’s fun, it’s quick, and while it is story driven there’s plenty of room to sidestep or ignore it if you’re just looking to feed the beast in more ways than one. 

Ronald Gordon is a New York Videogame Critics Circle Member and Mentor. He was the first of our writers – or any intern anywhere – to complete an internship at Rockstar Games.

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