I love cooking sims. If you ask me why, I won’t have an answer for you, other than some vague gesturing at the concept of food and something about the combining food and management into something that looks like even I could make in my kitchen if I really wanted. I enjoy the menu planning of Dave the Diver, the frenetic pace of Cook, Serve, Delicious, the absolute insanity of Overcooked, and really, just everything about cooking sims. Combine that with serving ice cream to a mini Baba Yaga, and it feels inevitable that I would find my way to Creature Kitchen.

Feeding your friendly neighbourhood raccoons is never a mistake. Just so we’re clear.

Creature Kitchen is a cosy cooking sim. Players take on the role of the Steward, managing a cabin in the woods and tending to its many odd denizens. Tending to the residents of the cabin and its surrounding areas means photographing them, figuring out their favourite foods, and learning to cook for them, being rewarded in turn with love, friendship, and more opportunities to make friends.

Creature Kitchen is possibly one of the most definitionally cosy games I’ve played in a long time. One of my colleagues at Summit, Halicor, recently wrote an excellent piece wherein he defined “cosy” as a minimally frictioned game, designed less to be a challenge, and more to be a self-insert into a gentler, kinder world. While Creature Kitchen occasionally offers hints that all is not right with its world - with the radio being the biggest tell that, beyond this cabin, there be monsters - the cabin and the gameplay included within it is as frictionless as I think a game of this type can be. There are no real consequences, nothing particularly challenging, and, despite its occasionally spooky atmosphere, nothing that will leave the player on the edge of their seats. This is fundamentally a game about building a found family through food and care, with very occasional basic puzzles along the way.

This is, of course, what the game designers intended. Cosy is very much in vogue, and in all honesty, I don’t blame anyone for that. The world is not a particularly kind or happy one at the moment, and having games that are pure escapism from not only the world, but the concept of stress itself is valid. The same is true of found families and the recognition that, for many, there is a need for family that isn’t captured by biological relatives. This is a game that ticks the boxes of what players are currently looking for, and does so well.

The end result, though, is a game that, while it’s cute and delightful in the moment, leaves no lasting impression. There are no particular warm fuzzies that linger with me after the game is done. There’s no happy message or thought to take me with me as I wander back out into the wide, cruel world. It’s a candyfloss game, here for however long it lasts, and then gone, leaving nothing but the stick behind.

Rarely, but thank you, kind moth.

In writing this review, I’ve been on the fence about whether or not this being a wispy game is a valid thing to critique. Not every game has to mean something or have some grand message, nor does every game have to leave an impact on its players. It, in theory, ought to be enough to enjoy a game for what it is, rather than get frustrated at what it’s not.

At the same time, though, when a game is so immediately forgettable and leaves so quickly, that has to say something about what the game is and how well it actually works at what it wants to be. There are cosy games that absolutely linger, leaving their players with a sense of hope or community long after the end credits roll, games that build their found families and leave the players thinking about them well after the story has completed. There are cosy games that add a bit of friction and challenge, just to make the catharsis of getting to the friendship or love or family that undergirds them just that much sweeter.

When a game is completely frictionless, and when it offers nothing but moving through the motions of care, it’s difficult to remember the value of the action. Care is more than the outcome of actions. Care is the emotion that goes into the act, the sense of obligation and empathy for another being that compels us to do something in the first place.

In a frictionless, perfect escape, what motivation is there to do anything? When there is no struggle, there is no catharsis, no reason to be invested in anything going on. I’ll be fine, and they’ll be fine, and we all know it, so why go through these actions at all?

Ah, the British approach to guacamole

There is, of course, the fact that this is a game, and ostensibly, I picked it up because I did feel some degree of motivation to play it. I wanted to make sandwiches for raccoons or chowder for an octopus, and I did all that. The game presents a cast of nominally spooky characters in a nominally spooky place, then provides the player with everything they need to befriend them. There is no shortage of ingredients, only the briefest of puzzles, and only the smallest of minigames to stand between the player and their cosy found family. There’s no friction, no challenge, just cute creatures spouting up hearts after you hork a burrito at them.

It should be enough, but yet, after the game ended, I just felt nothing. There was no catharsis in any of this. The game could flash all the cute creatures and wonderfully designed sets at me it liked, but without something undergirding them - some structure, some reason to believe any of this mattered, even within the scope of the world - it felt hollow.

I don’t mind being thrust into cosy. I am human, and want to feel loved and protected and wanted like anyone else. Without that feeling earned, though, without a reason to believe it’s real and warranted, it doesn’t - can’t - linger, and ends up just feeling hollow.

Developer: The Rat Zone
Genre: Cosy, Cooking sim
Year: 2026
Country: United States
Language: English
Play Time: 3 hours
Playthrough: https://youtu.be/FNimiC1-iak