I love cooking, and I love video games. Surely, this means that a game like KuloNiku: Bowl Up would be right down my alley! So when I was offered the opportunity to preview it over the holiday season, I ate it right up. I can’t wait for the full thing, because I got totally sucked into the preview build I played, even though it was only a few hours long.
It’s easy to go into a sort of flow state while you cook up different noodle and meatball soups for people, which is surprising given how fast-paced it can be. You want to cook each dish as quickly as possible to maximize customer satisfaction (and, presumably, tips). At the same time, you don’t want to make any mistakes, as resetting a dish costs time, and serving an improper meal is even worse. Given you’re running your (seemingly late) grandma’s restaurant alongside a friend, you feel extra inspired to make the place and its reputation shine.
Juggling the numerous minigames, like cutting up toppings and washing dishes, keeps you on your toes while the timer ticks down, making for a pleasantly stressful experience. Admittedly, I don’t have any restaurant experience (my teenage and young adult years were instead spent in the hellish realm of retail), so I can’t speak to how accurate this tension is to the real thing, but it does feel as intense as it does in cooking shows. That said, the game offers a “cozy” mode that turns off the timers, so people looking for a more laid-back cooking simulator can play that way.
One goofy thing is that some orders will be altered to the point of essentially just being toppings or condiments. I can’t tell if this is intentional or not, but it’s very funny to have a customer ask for a squirt of soy sauce and chilli sauce in a bowl, then enthusiastically say it’s exactly what they wanted. My suspicion is that this isn’t intentional, since some of the goofy orders would also have small typos or grammatical errors, but it’s comical nonetheless and actually fits the silly, cozy atmosphere of the game.
Meatball Brawls are a whole other (meat)ball game in KuloNiku: Bowl Up. Think of it as a cooking competition show like Iron Chef, where your meal is being judged against another contestant’s in an interesting turn-based manner. You get to do three things per turn (each meatball, noodle bundle, or topping you prepare counts as one thing), with certain actions gaining you more points based on what the crowd is thrilled about. It’s a fun atmosphere to cook in, feeling like a shonen anime (specifically, Food Wars) about cooking.
KuloNiku: Bowl Up! keeps you on y0ur toes with flavor management.
While trying to please the crowd, you’re also attempting to incorporate certain necessary ingredients while also balancing out the flavor profile to match the judge’s preferences. This makes for some exciting challenges: the required ingredients may make a meal sour, which the judge dislikes in favor of a salty flavor, meaning you’ve got to include them, tone down the sour, and make it salty all at once. It’s a well-crafted system that requires a certain amount of strategy, making for an impressively complicated but never overwhelming mechanic.
Though they weren’t fully present in this build, the promise of fleshed-out social links with KuloNiku: Bowl Up’s many charming side characters seems like it will add another dimension to everything, with the little dialogue/hangout events that were present in this build being pretty enjoyable.
I certainly think KuloNiku: Bowl Up is worth keeping an eye on if you’re interested in cooking games, or even just cozy titles. Alongside its exciting, fast-paced cooking gameplay, the game’s lovingly realized anime-inspired visuals and pleasant characters have me excited to make some more goofy soups when it launches down the line.
