Co-op Kaiju Horror Cooking was provided by Strange Scaffold for review. Thank you!
Occasionally, a game comes around when I wonder how a developer’s mind works. Co-Op Kaiju Horror Cooking is one of those games. The video game title alone makes me wonder where people get their ideas. I can imagine what booze was involved! Funny titles aside, the result is an enjoyable experience with friends, although the game needs significant improvement, particularly in performance.
Kaiju Horror Cooking is, obviously, heavily favored for cooperative gameplay. You can play solo by hosting a game with just one player, but the game is much harder without allies to back you up, since the game requires lots of teamwork to progress. I would like them to have a solo option that is easier to find in the menu, but this is just me being pedantic.
The concept of the game is simple enough, but creative. Gigantic monsters from the deep will kill you unless they are satisfied. How do these creatures become happy? We must feed them their favorite dishes until their appetite for doom and destruction is satiated. Once pleased, they will retreat into the sea and wherever they come from.
While there is combat during the underground dungeon crawls, where you scavenge for resources, that isn’t working with the big Kaijus. Since this isn’t Pacific Rim, players' only option to avoid becoming Kaiju fodder is to cook meals and feed them. It is a bizarre blend of dungeon crawling and cooking mechanics that we don’t often see in video games, let alone sating the appetites of giant monsters.
The game has four chapters, and while the content is streamlined right now, the gameplay is a ton of fun. The visuals were the first thing I found striking, with their low-poly textures and high-quality lighting. All the NPCs look like little Playmobil figures, and the Kaiju monsters are more goofy than frightening. A game I’ve been playing recently with similar graphic design is Project Silverfish, and while these games' visuals won’t win any prizes, I’ve grown rather fond of this art style.
Between missions, players converge in an underground den where the order of Chefs dwell, offering supplies and advice for your journey. I was disappointed with the lack of world interaction in this section, because the only thing you can do is collect some random items and exchange short dialogue conversations with the few monks scattered in the area.
Players will juggle roaming the procedurally generated dungeons for ingredients and cooking the meals for the monsters every year. The Kaiju quickly realize they have the players dancing to their tune, and the difficulty keeps spiking. I would love to see some difficulty settings for tweaking the timer, since it can sometimes be too stressful. I don't want the game to be too easy, but the time limit feels too low, especially when playing solo or in pairs.
Dungeon crawls become a delightful and stress-inducing romp through dark corridors, and I had a ton of fun exploring the dungeons, trying to find ingredients. You have minimal inventory space and must juggle ingredients with equipment and potions to heal yourself in combat. Enemies roam these dark underground corridors and take great pleasure in murdering anyone who enters their home. The combat is rather basic, and attacking feels clumsy, but it gets the job done.
There are also traps to avoid, which can come out of nowhere. I died more than once because of ridiculous contraptions like flamethrowers roasting me alive while I walked across a bridge. I think these architects don’t want the Kaiju to be fed.
While the core gameplay is great fun, the game is hindered by a fair amount of jank. Some drop physics are very wonky, so when I tried dropping ingredients into the giant catapult or the fire, they sometimes bounced away. It adds to the comedic experience, but I’d like to see them improved a bit. The game is also surprisingly intensive for something with modest graphical fidelity. I saw frequent framerate drops and stutters. While I didn't encounter any major crashes, I did run into some bugs, such as getting stuck on terrain, which was particularly annoying given the time limit.
While Kaiju Horror Cooking needs some polish, this cooking pot has a surprising amount of game for its low price tag.
While Kaiju Horror Cooking has some things going for it, including controller support, I cannot call this a good experience for the Steam Deck. As previously mentioned, the game needs a lot of work to optimize, and while the game is technically playable, it requires too many compromises.
The game controls well enough with stock settings, although I recommend adjusting camera sensitivity as high as possible. By default, I found moving the camera to be incredibly slow. Regarding performance, I was disappointed with how rough the experience was. Unfortunately, you can forget about tweaking any TDP values, as I found the Deck needs all the power it can get.
The only way I hit 60 FPS was by turning the resolution scaling to the minimum, but this made the game look like I dumped the Steam Deck into a vat of rice pudding.
Despite all these grievances, the game remains playable with compromises. Low settings make it relatively stable when capping the FPS to 30. There are still some hitches during the underground crawling sequences, but this is the best option for the Steam Deck. Even with the framerate lock, I observed an average power draw of around 15 watts. It still had spikes to 17-18 watts during the dungeon sections. Don’t expect much battery life with this one, with around 3 hours on the Steam Deck OLED, but the game is best suited for short bursts anyway.
Co-op Kaiju Horror Cooking is currently only available in English. Other language support is currently in development.
It does come with some nice accessibility features. You can freely change keybinds, capping framerate, invert camera, toggle sprint and crouch, and hide or anonymize player names when teaming up with players in a lobby.
Despite being slightly undercooked, Co-op Kaiju Horror Cooking has achieved something scarce for me. I enjoyed playing with other people in the game! We get a refreshing mash of dungeon crawling and cooking mechanics for a low price tag, which makes for some unique gameplay. The developers have done a solid job with this game so far.
It still needs some work, but overall, this is a solid little snack of a game. If you want to play this solely on the Steam Deck, wait to see if any optimizations come to the game. While technically playable, there are too many compromises to get to that point.
このレビューはPC版に基づいています。
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Co-op Kaiju Horror Cooking is great fun with friends for a very reasonable price tag, although performance issues and jank hold it back a little.
