KuloNiku: Bowl Up! – Review

The older I get, the more I realize how much I love cozy games, especially life sims and cooking games. These generally fall into a few categories. Life sims often involve farming or other similar activities, or you get a game where you take on godlike control over the daily life of the people in the game, like The Sims. For cooking games, well, you cook. The location may vary (a food truck, kitchen, assisting Mama, etc.), but generally it’s straightforward cooking.

Now, KuloNiku: Bowl Up! from Gambir Studio combines these 2 genres into something I wasn’t expecting at all. As with a lot of small stories, you are a young person who moves back into a town to take over a family business. In this case, it’s your grandmother’s meatball restaurant, Bakuso. Your background is left rather ambiguous, but quickly your past seems to surface as the townsfolk interact with you. Your assistant went to college with you, and a strange entrepreneur remembers you from Marrakesh (although he keeps your secrets).

The cast of characters you meet is delightful, from Stella (your rival) to Ume (the local shopkeeper from whom you buy equipment, décor and ingredients) to the TV personality who hosts the Meat Brawls (more on that momentarily).

The life sim/relationship part is light, but you can make friends, and if you choose the ‘right’ responses, you can deepen your relationships. While I didn’t find most of the stories compelling, I enjoyed the feeling of becoming part of the community I was living in. The decorating component is also on the lighter side, not a lot of options, but you don’t spend a lot of time staring at your restaurant dining room, so it didn’t bother me too much. Ume’s family shop has a limited inventory each week, with restocks on Fridays.

Cooking is the primary component of KuloNiku, and it’s split into 2 parts. Cooking in your restaurant, you’ve taken over, and the Brawls I mentioned above. Each day in your restaurant comprises filling 3 orders, you will always be able to make the requests because they are generated based on the ingredients you have on hand. You will see that they have requests you can’t fill, but change their mind to something you can make. Make note of these things if you are looking to see what ingredients you might want to buy from Ume’s shop. Orders have 3 main components: your meats and noodles, add-ins like chili peppers or pickled bok choy. And your seasonings like sweet soy sauce or fried shallots. Each requested dish has a flavour profile, and some customers will ask for alterations. Good thing each ingredient changes the profile in some way. Pay attention to the sliders under the categories like salty, sweet, sour and hot and make sure you find what the customer looks for. This requires a little extra attention because when a customer requests sweet but not salty, you won’t want to reach for your sweet soy sauce for example.

I loved determining how each ingredient worked, especially since there is a maximum number of items you can add to each bowl, so you need to plan strategically. Learning the shortcut also helps with timing, as you have a finite amount of time before each customer gets upset. The amount of reputation and customer satisfaction depends not only on the speed of your order completion, but also on how accurate it is. Right down to whether you give them the proper utensils if they request chopsticks or a fork specifically. Mess up the order, and the customer may request a refund, affecting your profit for the day.

At the end of each day, you can choose to shop at Ume’s store, or head into the city, or even chat to some of the people you’ve already met. Be careful when choosing your reactions, though; certain selections mean skipping ahead to certain weekdays, meaning you might miss out on opportunities to make money. Luckily, you can decline and accept on another day most of the time. It’s a balance that’s hard to achieve; you need to Brawl to advance the story, you need to increase relationships, and you absolutely need cash for upgrades. The end of the day is also when you can change your décor or craft new recipes if you have collected the required ingredients.

As your restaurant grows and you upgrade and buy new ingredients, your menu becomes more varied and complex. The first few days are your tutorial, and as you start to have the options to buy new things, you must think about what would offer you the most benefit. Would you like to buy an ingredient to have more recipe options, or would you like to buy additional bowls to not have to wash as many dishes? I loved the feature of being able to redesign your cooking space to make things more linear and save you time. Choosing how you work space is laid out can affect your efficiency.

Now on to the 2nd cooking component, the TV show MeatBrawl contests. These are composed of a head-to-head cook-off between you and another restaurant owner. You have a judge and an entire audience to impress. The judge (s) each have their own preferences for flavour profile, and your objective is to use your knowledge to make the best dish to score the most points. Balancing risk vs reward on each of your 3 rounds gets more complex when you have more than one judge. Each action you take starts a small, rather simple mini game, but enough to keep the game interesting. Each round has a limited amount of action points as well, so learning how to maximize each round is key. You will never make every judge completely happy, so your objective is to get the most positive points you can and defeat your opponent.

As the game progresses, you can bring a friend to assist you at the MeatBrawls, and each person has their own buff, so choosing who you bring is strategic.

Quick note about some accessibility options. The regular mode includes the timer while cooking, but there is also a cozy mode that you can enable to make the cooking less stressful. This is a wonderful addition if you just want to play the game with no stress.

KuloNiku is the most recent narrative-driven cooking sim I’ve played, and I play quite a few of them. I enjoyed its cozy vibes and satisfying gameplay loop. It has a fun, colourful aesthetic as well. While I would have loved a little more in-depth storytelling and décor-related objectives, I won’t hesitate to recommend this even just for the interesting cooking and the MeatBrawls.