KuloNiku: Bowl Up! Review – A Cozy Cooking Game With Surprising Depth

KuloNiku: Bowl Up! is a fast-paced, cozy cooking game that blends a sharp anime aesthetic with pleasant writing to create a rather unique title. I ran into a little stuttering here and there, but the game itself is probably the most fun you could have cooking bizarre noodle combinations for quirky customers.

I first previewed KuloNiku: Bowl Up! back in January, and though the preview build was naturally limited, I was pretty excited about the full release. Now that the release has arrived, and it’s every bit as endearing and smooth as I had hoped, even with a couple of tiny technical follies present as of writing.

KuloNiku: Bowl Up! has you running a restaurant left to you by your grandmother. There’s a surprising amount of backstory to the game, involving super spies and hidden secrets, which had me more enthralled than I had anticipated. The narrative hits plenty of familiar anime tropes, from tsundere cooking rivals to dramatic declarations that lead to wild competitions, but it never comes off as overly reliant on clichés. Instead, it feels like a fantastically homage-laden love letter to these iconic elements that builds on them and, as a result, manages to stand on its own two feet with its story.

There really is a fascinating flow state you end up entering in KuloNiku: Bowl Up! on a day-to-day basis, as cooking up and assembling the various components of each noodle dish keeps your brain occupied in an interesting way. Pretty quickly, you’re hardly even thinking as you quickly put together all kinds of special requests and recipes, and even though there’s pressure to go as quickly as possible, you end up feeling more relaxed than anything. Of course, if you’d prefer to have no pressure at all, there’s a “cozy” mode that removes timers and the like to make things as chill as possible, so there’s an experience available for any type of gamer.

Cooking in KuloNiku: Bowl Up! takes an interesting twist with the Meatball Brawls, which add a turn-based element to everything. You only have so many actions you can take in each of your three turns, and you have to meet certain flavor profiles and conditions for your dish to please the judge. It’s a cool variant that changes up the usual gameplay loop while also providing an extra helping of the over-the-top anime vibe the game thrives on, and I’m impressed by how the developers managed to spice up the gameplay without making it so different it’s hard to get used to.

But even outside of the daily restaurant activities and cooking battles, there’s a whole social system you can take part in. On evenings and days off, you can spend time with a good deal of the side characters, which gives you a chance to learn more about them. It’s a decently fleshed-out system that certainly helps expand the cast, and I found all the characters well-written enough to want to spend that additional time with them.

KuloNiku: Bowl Up! has a truly satisfying upgrade loop.

You consistently earn money that can be used to buy upgrades that make cooking easier and faster, and allow for more complicated recipes. It’s so satisfying to cook, then improve, then repeat the cycle as new items are added to the shop and new cooking mechanics are introduced to your kitchen. Things are constantly getting slightly more complicated and simultaneously more enjoyable to juggle, which speaks to how well-designed this loop is.

I really want to give props to the visuals and audio of KuloNiku: Bowl Up!, which go a long way towards making it such a pleasant game to play. The character models and settings certainly nail the ‘90s/2000s anime look, while the music has a very quirky, slice-of-life feel to it that constantly reminds you that, despite how quickly you’re thinking and clicking, nothing you’re doing is ever too serious.

I did notice a couple of times when playing on my desktop, the game would stutter a bit towards the end of a customer giving an order at the desk. It only lasted around five seconds whenever it happened, and it wasn’t frequent enough to derail my experience or anything, but it did occur enough times to make it worth noting.