Review: Creature Kitchen
Creature Kitchen is the third (and most ambitious) title from appropriately-named development team The Rat Zone, who, depending on who you ask, have either the best or worst website for any game developer in 2026. Frankly, whatever that thing is supposed to be is deserving of a review in and of itself, but that might have to wait, because as bizarre and interesting as it might be, their games are more than a match for it.
Their previous title, Chairs, was certainly out-there: if anything Creature Kitchen seems to have dialed things back a bit in comparison. I think that’s probably for the best, and that Creature Kitchen might nail the level of weirdness, between its unusual concept and its creepy aesthetics. On that, I am known not to really go in for horror, and on the surface, Creature Kitchen looks an awful lot like it might tend towards that. The dark spooky night, the flashlight mechanic, little things jumping out at you: but the difference is, here the things jumping out at you are… kinda cute.
Image: The Rat Zone
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Developer: The Rat Zone
Publisher: The Rat Zone
Release: 6 February 2026
Retail Price (Steam): 7,79€/$7.99/£6.69
Towards the start of Creature Kitchen you’re provided, in relatively cryptic terms, with your main mission – if the title wasn’t enough of a hint, it’s to cook meals for… creatures. To quote the note attached to the fridge: ‘Keep them fed and you should have nothing to worry about.’ Bit ominous, sure, and who those creatures are is not entirely clear; you’ll probably have heard the unmistakable hoot of an owl on your short walk down to the house, but where exactly it came from is anyone’s guess.
You’ve got a few areas to explore upon entering the house for the first time, but one of the first things you’ll come across is a 16-page book which helpfully, if not somewhat vaguely, details the locations of all the creatures that you’re able to find in the game. That’s about all the information it gives you to begin with: until you get a photograph of them, you won’t know what they are and what it is they want to eat. Once you grab the nearby camera and successfully snap a photo of them though, the book will update and tell you exactly what it is they’re after.
Image: The Rat Zone
The first three of the book’s creatures are very easy to get a picture of, but a couple of them immediately provide a couple of problems. Firstly, that your box of recipes starts off incredibly sparse – if a critter isn’t interested in toast, pancakes or French fries, then you won’t know how to make it. While one of those three isn’t the pickiest of eaters – the first animal, the crow, who will eat literally anything – the other two have demands beyond your culinary limitations. One of them wants a bunch of meals which involve cheese (three guess what species they might be) and the other has a similarly restrictive diet, composed of meals which aren’t covered by any of those starting options.
Luckily, there are recipes hidden everywhere. Some of those can be found as easily as looking into a hanging basket or shaking a loose drainpipe, but a lot are hidden behind puzzles. Those are all pretty straight-forward: they ramp up a little as time goes on – it's never anything too arduous, but it gets slightly more difficult than picking up an idol and placing it back on the table that it appears to have fallen off of.
It’s not just the recipes you’ll need to find but the ingredients themselves, and it’s primarily through that mechanic that progress is gated. You’ll immediately notice that there are a lot of padlocks and locked doors preventing you from accessing most of the cupboards in the kitchen, and other areas within the house itself. While you do find a key or two from your own exploration, it’s a lot more common to receive these as a gift for befriending a creature, which is done by providing them with whichever meals it is they want. Those keys give you access to new ingredients, new recipes, and new creatures. That’s not entirely linear: not everyone will find and complete the game’s fifteen creatures in the exact same order, but there are a lot of occasions where you won’t be able to unlock a specific creature without having befriended the previous one in a chain.
Image: The Rat Zone
It is, by intention, a short experience: it took me almost exactly two hours to roll credits – it would’ve been less than that if I could successfully fry an egg without flipping it out of the pan, and if I could avoid accidentally tossing out freshly-mixed ingredients. To be fair to the game, I could’ve done things slightly more creatively and, if players are particularly keen, there might be a few loose ends for them to tie up after that. Nothing crazy: this isn’t Blue Prince where there’s a whole ‘nother game buried under the first, but there is, for example, an achievement for making every meal in the game, something which you almost certainly won’t have done in a regular playthrough.
That’s partially down to what I meant when I said I could’ve done things more creatively. The creatures typically have a relatively broad request: there are over forty different recipes in the game (forty-three, I think, if we’re being specific) but to reach the end I only ended up needing to use about twenty-five of them. We’ll take that crow as an example: as it’ll accept any meal, you could spend time making something which requires you to use multiple different ingredients, combine other ingredients in your mixer, and use your frying pan to cook something up… or you could just stick a slice of bread in the oven to make toast and call it a day.
The crow is by no means the only creature that’ll accept toast, either: while you usually have to give each creature three or four meals before you can befriend it, and so will need to make a few of the more complex recipes, it does mean that if you’re just trying to accomplish befriending them without any flair, you can often reuse easier recipes to tick off one or two of those meals. I don’t really think the game gives you much incentive not to do that, and, other than that already-mentioned Steam achievement – there’s no incentive to diversify what you give the creatures.
Image: The Rat Zone
Even if you were going out of your way to constantly make unique meals, there are some that you just wouldn’t get round to: without offering spoilers, there’s a trio of items I can think of which are more-or-less the same thing. I made one of them once for a creature – I could’ve used any of the three – and never touched any of them ever again. I know The Rat Zone were trying to make a smaller experience, it’s part of their game-making mission statement and the price of Creature Kitchen reflects that, but I think there was potential for a little more here.
Without needing to add any more ingredients or recipes, I think there could’ve easily been a handful more creatures – it wouldn’t need to be many, four or five – just to encourage players to use a few more of those recipes that were otherwise unused and make the game feel that little bit more complete. Having two creatures in a room instead of one, and having to befriend both before you get access to the next location — that sort of thing. I also have to admit that I was surprised when I reached the ending: it felt like it came too soon, and somewhat abruptly: I didn’t realise that was what was happening until a few moments before the credits appeared on my screen.
Image: The Rat Zone
Maybe that’s just my reluctance to leave the game talking, because it is a surprisingly relaxing place to be. I mentioned my trepidation surrounding horror games, and the aesthetic did have me a little worried that I wasn’t going to enjoy being in Creature Kitchen’s world. And look, I’m skittish: I won’t pretend there wasn’t a few times that the game made me jump, but here it was followed by an ‘oh, it’s just you,’ or a ‘hey whatcha doing there little buddy’ rather than, y’know, alt-tabbing the game and fleeing from my computer. I can’t say I had any dreams about the game after playing it, but I imagine if I had they would’ve probably been quite pleasant, as opposed to the nightmare-fuel that you might associate with the initial retro-horror vibe that this game gives off. It calls itself a ‘creepy-cozy cooking simulator’ and I didn’t necessarily trust the ‘cosy’ part of that – I was definitely wrong to do so.
Not since the aforementioned Blue Prince – my game of the year last year, should you need reminding – have I felt so immersed in a game’s world, which I guess adds to my wish that there had just been a few more reasons to stay in it for longer. I do have that nagging feeling that I’ve left Creature Kitchen with an experience that’s not quite complete: I’ve made videos about much shorter games which still felt the perfect length, so it’s not that it’s too short for a game as a general rule, but rather that there was all this stuff I just… never used. Each time I collected a new recipe card or ingredient I felt there was a promise that there was a good chance I was going to use it, and that wasn’t really the case. Counterintuatively, if there’d been less of those, then perhaps I’d have left the game feeling more fulfilled.
That aside, Creature Kitchen was exactly what was promised – a cosy and occasionally creepy experience, with a vibe that’s so unique that it’s worth picking up on that alone. It is awarded a 7.5/10 by IndieLoupe.com.
The reviewed product was purchased by IndieLoupe,com.
