Meatball soup. I don’t think I’ve ever actually had “meatball soup” and the idea doesn’t exactly sound all-too appealing to me—but after having the chance to try out Gambir Studio and Raw Fury’s up-and-coming cooking management with a-hint-of-social-elements-to-it title ‘KuloNiku: Bowl Up!’, I think I’m starting to turn around on the idea a bit. The cosy nature of the game helps, but it also makes food look very appealing and me slightly upset that I don’t have a neighbourhood noodles shoppe to drown myself in salt when I’m feeling mildly peckish.
KuloNiku has players take on the role of an ordinary city boy or girl as they return back to the city of Kuloniku to take over their grandmother’s old meatball, noodles, and soup shoppe Bakuso. Turns out, the old hag ran a mean establishment up until she decided to retire, which means we have big shoes to fill in. And that reminder comes marching right through the door with our first customer (well, not quite anyway): the rockstar and meatball-enthusiast Stella, and she’s none-too-pleased to see us instead of the old bag.
(Gambir Studio/Raw Fury)
At the heart of KuloNiku is its food preparation and serving mechanic. Here, players take on orders from customers that come in over the course of a single day to serve them whatever they ask. Some customers will order a simple set of meatballs and noodles, but others will indulge themselves on desires best left in the dark with orders such as “two meatballs, some vinegar power, no soup”. You’ll jump between making some of the nicest, tastiest looking dishes around to serving horror-shows, but the customer is always right and so long as they’re paying I guess it’s okay.
Well, no, not really. An option to kick customers out would be nice.
But getting back on track, once you’ve taken a customer’s order you just need to put things together. You’re on a somewhat lengthy timer to get the food out (this can be turned off!), so it’s a good idea to enumerate what needs to be cooked and cut up while also referring to the cookbook and the order itself to get your diner out the door with a smile on their faces. Plus, it nets you a boost to revenue, which you’ll need to add to your list of ingredients and to trick out Bakuso itself. Seriously, this place doesn’t even have chairs or dining tables until much later—where the heck are these customers eating their food? Standing? This isn’t a gyro place.
The more you build up Bakuso, the more money you make and more features unlock over the course of the game. I thought the game did a great job of pacing introductions to new mechanics and I never felt overwhelmed jumping from the kitchen into the other little objectives and even the life social stuff that occasionally pops up. Sometimes, you get the chance to hang out with some of the residents of KuloNiku and as you do so, you’ll become good friends (and presumably more than that) with them which unlocks you the chance to learn new recipes and learn more about the town and themselves.
Cooking and making merry with the townsfolk and all that is nice and dandy, but if you want Bakuso to get anyway, you’re going to have to take on some of the fiece competition in the area in what is known as a Meatball Brawl. The game operates on a weekly schedule, and on Sunday and Wednesday, players can use their day off from the shoppe to take on other chefs to steal their spot on the leaderboards in a spin to the usual cooking game they’ll be doing at Bakuso.
You see, here we’ve a Judge who will have a very specific taste quality and a dislike. They’ll be paired up with a dish the audience wants to see and whatever special flavour the judge is looking for this time around. This time, there’s no timer, but rather we’re working with a specific no-recipe challenge that asks us to make the best possible dish with all the ingredients at our hand while clearing the minigames that come up when we’re cutting or boiling or whatever that needs to be done. If you toss in the stuff the judge likes, a bonus bar will fill and if you max that bar out, an additional point will be added to your final score—and that point can be the difference between winning and losing!
This is a brawl, however, which means you have a chef on the other side working their way up the scoreboard too. That bonus bar I mentioned is shared between contestants, which means if you try to impress a judge too quickly but fail to fill the bar to completion, your rival will swoop in and take it for themselves. Oh, and did I mention this is a turn-based competition? You have three actions per turn, which means you need to think about which ingredients to toss in over the course of the three-turn brawl so you don’t give your opponent and unnecessary advantages.
I really enjoyed this mode as it’s more of a puzzle solving task with a hint of randomness that really gets my brain churning a bit. Ingredients can modify the properties of your final dish, so it becomes a challenge of “what goes in first to make sure the final dish comes out with the sour/salty/sweet status” all the while keeping the judge on their toes and not too excited. Beat these challenges, and you get fame, story progression, and vouchers that’ll help you make Bakuso yours.
(Gambir Studio/Raw Fury)
I had the game for a few weeks and played on and off, and each time I hopped on I ended up spending quite a bit of time just cooking away and getting Bakuso shaped up. The city of Kuloniku is more town-ish by nature, reminding me of a busting Downtown Des Plaines (pronounce the ess, please) with the air of San Fransisco thanks to the helpful cast who chant their delights and ideaphones in Japanese. Besides existing to just make me hungry, I am genuinely looking forward to KuloNiku’s full game down the line. I didn’t know I needed a cosy cooking game until late last year! ∎
Oh, and it runs very well on macOS!
