We’re heading into spooky season, the nights are slowly getting longer, and the temperature is finally (thankfully) cooling, so we’re about to start seeing an influx of Halloween-themed games on the indie radar. Spookitchen is one of those games, and it is utterly adorable. 

Spookitchen is a lovable combination of the store management and dungeon-crawling genres in development by YNOT, a Korea-based two-person development team. It’s a strange combination, for sure, but it’s one that weirdly works to create something that is thoroughly enjoyable to play. 

A restaurant for the dead

The beginning of Spookitchen is a strange one. Apparently, you and three friends were running a restaurant during your lives that did very well, but then one of those friends killed all of you and has become your rival when it comes to running restaurants that cater to the dead. 

If I’m honest, the story lost me a little bit and fell into the background as soon as I started playing, but it’s a fun little backstory if you can follow it. The aim of the game is to serve as many customers as you can, fulfilling their requests for specific types of meals or beverages, to become more popular than your apparent murderer and now rival restaurateur. 

Once you’ve actually begun to play, the gameplay loop is simple, albeit problematic to execute. You take orders, you enter the dungeons to gather up the ingredients using your array of tools, and then you head back to the kitchen to prepare the meals for delivery. Simple, but the details involved in each step are what provide the challenge. 

Dungeon diving and delicacy delivery

Taking the order isn’t an issue, but things get interesting once you head into the dungeons. You have a lantern, shovel, axe, and other tools that are used as they would be in a cozy farming sim to gather ingredients in various different dungeons. The lantern acts as a gun, of sorts, allowing you to shoot down enemies to gain ingredients from them, as well. 

Each ingredient is a certain shape, and you only have a limited number of slots in your inventory, so actually gathering and holding on to your ingredients becomes something of a puzzle. You need to arrange them in a way that utilizes all the space without wasted slots; otherwise, you may end up leaving precious ingredients behind. 

This puzzle aspect kicks up a notch when it comes to actually cooking, because each recipe has a certain number of slots that need to be filled using a certain number of ingredients. You have to fill every slot, but you can’t use more ingredients than you’ve been allotted, so you need to make sure you have as many possible ingredients as you can hold to give you the best chance of making each recipe. 

Spooky, and yet adorable

The thing that stands out about Spookitchen more than anything else is how cute it is. The premise is undeniably dark, and you’re stuck serving food in the afterlife, which is my idea of hell, but everything from the characters to the ingredients themselves is utterly adorable. Everything has a face, looking like something from a kawaii-themed gacha pod, and you can’t help but be charmed by the aesthetic.

There are stores to buy upgrades, and you get the chance to purchase new recipes and perks after every day, or ‘round’ as it’s called in-game, that make the next day easier and yet more complicated at the same time. Every round brings new ingredients to find, new dungeons to explore, and more tasks to complete. But every new thing is just as cute as what came before, and you’ll always find something new to love. 

Spookitchen doesn’t have a release date or demo just yet, but YNOT was running a playtest from August 13 – 31. If you missed out, you can still go and add the game to your wishlist right now, and you’ll be notified if another playtest happens or when a demo hits Steam.