KuloNiku: Bowl Up! Balances Gameplay And Visuals To Create A Compelling Cooking Simulator - Preview

まだの方は、X(Twitter)、Mastodon、Blueskyでフォローし、新しい記事が投稿されたらお知らせください。また、Redditに参加したり、YouTubeに登録して、私たちのコンテンツをチェックしたり、素晴らしいコミュニティと交流してください。応援ありがとうございました！

KuloNiku's preview access was provided by Raw Fury. Thank you!

When I want to pass the time, simulators are one of my go-to games to play, and cooking simulators are my favorite. I love the whole process of taking orders, making food step by step, gaining reputation and money to buy new upgrades and ingredients, and customizing our restaurant. I have played a lot of them, but I feel that the upcoming KuloNiku: Bowl Up! strikes a great balance in its systems, finding a way to have accessible depth that feels good to play.

The game starts you off taking over your grandmother's meatball restaurant to bring it back up to its former glory. From my preview, I was able to get through some of the story, and I met an interesting cast of characters while exploring the city of KuloNiku. I am excited to play through the whole story and see what happens with the full release, but I'd say expect a heartwarming tale with a cast that feels memorable, based on my experience so far.

However, it was the combination of gameplay and visuals that made this game stand out to me. The actual loop of cooking the food felt like a great balance of complex games like Cooking Simulator and older, simpler simulators like Papa's Pizzeria. You take on one order at a time, making bowls of meatballs and noodles, also known as Bakso. This is a popular Indonesian dish, and one I have become well-versed with while living here in the country. It's also where the developer, Gambir Studio, is located.

We will essentially be making each bowl step by step. Cooking the meatballs and noodles in the hotpot, adding in spices and sauces, manually cutting ingredients to add to our bowl, and balancing flavors based on the customer's preferences. It isn't as in-depth as Cooking Simulator, but it definitely has extra steps that make it feel more detailed. It never feels overwhelming either; everything is easy to do and follow, and we don't feel the pressure of managing multiple orders at any given time. It goes one by one, making Bakso and side dishes to suit our clientele's taste.

The team also added some nice quality-of-life improvements to make managing orders easy. With the press of a button, you can bring up a sticky note with the customer's exact order, and another button to bring up the recipe book. There's also an optional cozy mode to get rid of the customer's patience meter to make cooking less stressful.

On top of the day-to-day cooking, we also have contests to increase our reputation, and I love how Gambir handled them. Instead of full real-time cooking against an opponent, you will each take 3 turns cooking, and in those turns, you can only take three actions. There is no time limit, giving as much time as needed to plan out your next move, and which ingredients you will use to get the exact flavor levels and type of Bakso the judge requests. The better you do, the more points you will get, and the one with the highest points wins the match after all 3 turns are over.

This is all complemented by the visual style, which I fell in love with. I love seeing games with more stylized visuals, but the blockier, more colorful, and cartoonish style of KuloNiku just accentuates each element to make it enjoyable to look at and play with. The game also has a flair of physics in there, from the water sloshing when washing dishes to the way the vegetables react when being chopped. They are small in the grand scheme, but I greatly appreciated them immensely.

And if there was any worry that KuloNiku would run on the Steam Deck, that worry shouldn't exist anymore. It is flawless on the Steam Deck, easily getting to 60 FPS with around 12W - 14W of battery drain. It can hit 90 FPS a lot of the time as well, but it will bottleneck and go down to 60 FPS in conversations, so letting it stick to 60 was the best for stability. Gamepad support is also quite fantastic, working like a charm with everything accessible with ease.

Ultimately, I feel like KuloNiku: Bowl Up! has a lot of promise. It strikes a fantastic balance in its gameplay, not feeling too complex or simple, but still having enough accessibility to make it easy to understand. This, combined with the visual style, elevates the experience to keep me coming back to make as much money as I can. I am excited to play through the story more once the game is fully released and spend more time with the cast, but for now, I would say it should absolutely be wishlisted and watched as we get to release.

KuloNiku: Bowl Up! can be wishlisted on Steam right now.

この記事を楽しんでいただけたなら、SteamDeckHQ の他のコンテンツもチェックしてみてください！あなたのゲーム体験に役立つゲームレビューやニュースを幅広く取り揃えています。ニュース、ヒントやチュートリアル、ゲーム設定やレビュー、最新のトレンド情報など、あらゆる情報をお届けします。 カバーしています！