This review was produced using a key provided by the developer.

As a lifelong American, I often feel a near-primordial urge to drive into the woods until I find an unoccupied cabin or cottage. I would set up there and live out the rest of my mortal moments, living off the land and befriending various forest critters like deer and tree-dwelling octopuses. Playing Creature Kitchen sated that urge. For now.

Beginning a little like a creepypasta flash game from the early 2010s, flashlight, dark forest, and all, the game soon opens up into a charmingly retro cooking sim. Between burning eggs and chopping carrots, players can sprint through the woods, scaring off every creature in a ten-mile radius and taking Polaroid pictures of them as they run off.

Heart, humor, and horror are balanced expertly with stupid simple cooking mechanics and delightful Dreamcast-era graphics. In short, this game cultivates a vibe.

One of the first things I did in my playthrough was throw the first mushroom I could see into the river, never to be seen again. As it floated out of reach, I followed it, finding an empty jar the tutorial informed me could be filled with fireflies.

This is related to a later puzzle, but I had stumbled into the solution mere moments after launching the game for the first time. As a certified intellectual, it pains me to write this, but I love easy puzzles.

Creature Kitchen is full of easy puzzles. Not overly easy, as I found myself stuck at one or two points, especially toward the end of my time in the cottage, but easy enough not to make progression frustrating.

Instead, progression is both intuitive and satisfying. Filling out one critter’s page in the album leads directly to the next, and if you get stuck, the hints on each page are quick to get you back on track.

Before I could start filling the album out, though, I had to turn on the power. After opening the breaker box and solving another puzzle, I received my first recipe card and the ability to stick a fork into an outlet. You know, for science.

That’s another great thing about this game. It encourages play.

Between the exploration required to find new ingredients and creatures, the game also doesn’t require the use of recipe cards. Instead, players can throw ingredients willy nilly into their oven, creating mistake after mistake until they brute force their way into an actual recipe.

Ingredients can be found all over the kitchen, around the cottage, and once picked up, in the pantry or fridge. The pantry is never-ending and comes complete with its own Eldritch entity that is fond of spaghetti, while the fridge rotates its stock every time you open and close the door.

Once you have the necessary ingredients, between one and four, they can be placed in “the void of creation,” or the oven, which combines them all using some sort of ancient magic. Is stir-fry traditionally cooked in the oven? No. Is this game operating using standard rules of reality as we understand them? Also no.

Speaking of the oven, it constitutes one of the four cooking mechanics in the game. Each is simplified to its basest components – the pan fries eggs and meat, the mixer produces new combined ingredients, the knife chops things – but provides enough diversity to keep gameplay from getting too stale.

For me, the steepest learning curve was the pan. Controlled via the motion of a control stick or mouse, the pan jerks wildly when the slightest pressure is applied to it, and launching ingredients out of the pan with a poorly timed flip is far too frequent an experience. Authentic to early 2000s gaming, sure, but frustrating all the same.

Also in the cottage is a small radio. This radio is perhaps the thing I will remember most from Creature Kitchen, as I feel it best demonstrates the amount of care the developers put into this game. The radio is unnecessary and easily-missable. I didn’t turn it on until two hours into my playthrough, content to enjoy the atmospheric background music, but once I did, I never turned it off.

There are three channels. The first is fantastically curated music from several artists, complete with an announcer between songs. Wonderful, but not exactly for me. The third is a traditional numbers station in the “Welcome to Night Vale” style, again including an announcer who is calling numbers just for the hell of it. But the second station, oh boy, I loved the second station.

It’s all commercials.

Bespoke commercials.

I have to give the developers so much credit for taking the time to write and record joke advertisements for their cooking game. That kind of attention to detail should be rewarded and replicated whenever possible, and it’s the kind of thing that turns a regular indie game into one that sticks with a player.

Finally, the story. I won’t spoil anything, but I very much enjoyed the ending. Over my playthrough I came to love the little critters I was spending time feeding, so when the game commended my compassion toward them, I teared up a little.

Given the fact this game can be 100% completed in less than four hours, it’s well worth your time. Come for the cooking, stay for the inclusion of an advertisement for the Season 1 DVD box set of “China Beach.”

Creature Kitchen: 8.0

The devil is truly in the details in Creature Kitchen, a charmingly retro experience with streamlined, sometimes-frustrating gameplay. The Rat Zone have crafted a game that balances heart, humor, and horror expertly, making for a short yet fulfilling experience.

Gameplay: 7.5

Atmosphere: 9.5

Story: 7