Creature Kitchen

I want more... game is so wonderful

I bought this game for me and a friend on 20 mins of demo playtime, and aced both the demo and the game. That should tell you everything you need to know. Do you like cryptids? Are you the "Mom/Dad Friend"? Do you enjoy or remember horror game aesthetics from the PS1 era? You'll love this game and make friends with everyone in it. CRITIQUES FOR THE DEVS: 1.) I do wish that there was a way to take things out of your pantry and actually put them back into your cupboards or drawers. You find nearly all of your ingredients in your cupboards or on shelves and I had assumed there'd be some aspect of organizing your kitchen to go with it. No. There is no way to put things BACK on the shelves after you've emptied them, resulting in a rather bland experience of picking things up once and then forever retrieving them from the pantry. The game could be greatly improved with more options or reasons to organize your kitchen or more interactions with the dev rats in your cupboards. Something to indicate that you've made the kitchen your home and moved into it. 2.) There's no rewards for feeding cryptid friends their favorite foods. Some recipe cards specifically highlight certain foods for certain residents. Giving them those dishes results in no special animation or even recognition that you've gone to the trouble of making it for them. That is somewhat disappointing. 3.) There's no way to feed "That Friend", which seems a bit of a missed opportunity. I would have liked to find out what "That Friend" would like to eat. (Very cool and creepy how he/she/it never gets any smaller after it appears, no matter how far away you get from it.) APPLAUSE FOR THE DEVS: 1.) The styling of the cooking mini game is really funny and horror-game-from-2000s feeling. It somehow feels both cozy and a bit ominous. Nothing about cooking really feels that challenging, but the animations and sound and visuals are satisfying enough that I never really got bored. In a longer game, it may have been an issue, but I had a lot of fun with it for the length of this game. 2.) The journal entries and camera photo Easter eggs are really fun little bits of unelaborate lore and I really like that the game presented them to me and didn't feel the need to actually explain them. 3.) The soundscape and atmosphere does an excellent job of making use of what the game has to offer. The sound isn't super detailed for each thing and the game is overall small, but it really lays its atmosphere on well. The eerie music in the pantry, the dithered faux PS1 filter, the simple mesh-painting on the low-poly models, the silly-creepy radio announcers... they all go together well to describe the mood. And that's really the reason why I bought this game, twice. This atmosphere is the best thing that the game does. It's pretty, cozy and there's a few moments that made me a little creeped out, just slightly. That's what this game does the best of all. It's striking that perfect Magnus Archives or Welcome to Nightvale feeling of something that's cozy and eerie (though less intense than MA), and that's a region I'm quite happy to exist in nearly all the time. [spoiler] That end scene made me tear up and I loved learning about the last caretaker. I really felt like I'd made a new weird little family. [/spoiler] TLDR: Despite some knit-picky things that would have been nice, I had a really fun time with this short little game, and I'd like for the devs to move forward with more games in this particular vibe. I'd like to see The Rat Zone make things with more interactivity and challenge, but if this is a first or second game, they've done a masterful execution of a particular woodsy folk horror cuteness that is close to my heart, and I would love very, very much to have more.