Another Order of Cozy Chaotic Cooking Game, KuloNiku: Bowl Up, please!
- Ellie
- 6 days ago
- 4 min read
Updated: 4 days ago
Developed by Gambir Game Studio and published by Raw Fury, KuloNiku: Bowl Up! is a cozy but also chaotic cooking game inspired by cooking classic, Cooking Mama.
If you're interested in the gameplay, make sure to check out my gameplay video below, otherwise lets get into the review!
What's KuloNiku: Bowl Up! Even About Anyway?
I was kindly gifted a key for KuloNiku: Bowl Up! and I have to admit I had really high hopes for this one, because one of my favourite games last year was Kitchen Sync: Aloha and this gave me really similar vibes! It did not disappoint!
In this cozy cooking game, you've just inherited Bakuso - your late grandma's metball restaurant and decide to re-open it with your best friend Cassie. Your goal is to bring the restaurant back to life and reinstate its reputation as the best meatball restaurant in town.
But it won't be as simple as just cooking nice food, because as you very quickly find out, there are also rival restauranters who are determined to see you fail! Your biggest rival being Stella, a menacing rockstar chef with crowds of groupies who runs the towns biggest restaurant: Souper Starz.
Cooking up Something Tasty...
The thing you’ll be doing the most in KuloNiku: Bowl Up! is cooking and running your restaurant. For 5 out of 7 days you’ll be opening your restaurant and cooking delicious meals for your customers.
Every customer will have a different request, whether that's ordering from the menu or asking for their own combination of ingredients.
At first it starts easy with just a hotpot station for you to deal with. But over time, you'll add several stations to your kitchen with skewers, garnishes, drinks, frying, and more! To top it off, the orders can get very tricky as well, with customers asking to balance spice levels, make a dish vegetarian, or even dictating the type of cutlery they want.
Take a look at this particularly tricky order I got!
Now at the top of the article I mentioned that the game can be both cozy and chaotic, that's because there's actually a difficulty mode of sorts that lets you tailor the game to your preference!
When first starting up, it'll asking if you want to play in Normal or Cozy mode. Normal mode gives every order a timer and the longer you take the more unhappy a customer will become (and the smaller your tip!)
Personally, I wanted to have fun with the game and the stress of having a countdown was not very cozy. So I switched onto cozy mode and was able to play the game at my own pace.
A Battle For Meatball Glory
The second biggest part of KuloNiku: Bowl Up! are the Meatball Brawls or cooking battles, where you battle against another restaurant owner to cook food for a panel of judges.
Each judge has a personal preference and each battle has unique special requests too that you need to take into account while cooking. Plus you can also invite one of your friends to come and cook with you, and every person has a special ability to help out!
I loved the cooking in general in this game because it was so interactive and each station felt very different, but the cooking battles were definitely my favourite. You need to methodically work through the likes/dislikes to create the highest scoring dish and the winner climbs up the town leaderboard.
The Real Reward is the Friends we Make Along the Way!
On the days off where you’re not doing cooking battles, you can hang out with your new friends to get closer to them.
These events are made up of cute little cutscenes with each character where you visit an area around town together, such as the Aquarium, Beach, or Theme Park. In total there are four characters for you to befriend, including your best friend Cassie, your ex-colleague Dan, your supplier and neighbour Ume, and one of Stella's groupies Shuga.
As you improve your relationships with characters and level up, you’ll unlock other benefits to help your day to day restaurant management like new recipes and new furniture.
The different illustrations of the characters during these Hang Out events are definitely one of the highlights to me; the developers clearly poured a lot of love into them as each one is overflowing with emotion.
A Delicious End to a Fantastic Game?
There are definitely surprises in store as you play through KuloNiku: Bowl Up! but I will say the later game (especially the trophy cleanup) did end up dampening my enjoyment slightly.
In the last few weeks every order was so tricky and convoluted that I ended up skipping some of them using a salt hack that my friend Rose let me know about. By this point I'd bought every ingredient, decorated my restaurant the way I wanted and was at max reputation so I didn't really need to make every customer happy.
The most frustrating part for me was trying to max out all the friendships as I'd finish a day and the characters I had max friendship with already were waiting outside, instead of the characters I still needed to befriend. There's also no way (that I'm aware of) to skip the days just to access the evening and improve your friendships.
Additionally these conversations with friends on an evening were often repeated with the same conversations coming up again and again, which is a shame considering how great the Hangout cutscenes are.
UPDATE: The Developers have just released an update to address this last complaint. Please find the news post here.
Final Thoughts
Overall I really enjoyed KuloNiku: Bowl Up! It's a mouthwatering cooking game packed full of charm and I really enjoyed the 16 or so hours I spent with it (of which 10 hours were the main storyline) and it's great to see that the developers are already addressing some of the complaints I had with it.
It also works perfectly on Steam Deck and I played almost the entire game there!
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