Creature Kitchen is a fireside menace about making bigfoot breakfast

Failbetter Games have described their upcoming eldritch-garden-'em-up Mandrake as having 'fireside menace'. This is a description I find pleasing, and I'm keen to blow oxygen on the flame of that term before something I find nauseating like "fluffy spookems" or "nightlight-slop" catches instead. This is most especially in light (that of a flickering, unreliable torch) of playing Creature Kitchen. It's a new-ish game where I threw PB&J sandwiches at a raccoon with the calculating expression of Jane Goodall observing a favourite gorilla.

In Creature Kitchen you materialise outside a small log cabin and use subtle video game context clues, such as written instructions, to divine that your job is to feed the titular creatures that live there. In the beginning these are recognisable, if Wednesday Addams-adjacent critters, like the aforementioned raccoon, a raven, a mouse. 

You prepare meals by bish-bash-boshing ingredients in your oven, and throw them at the cryptid in question, in a paper lunch bag. When they're pleased, they provide keys to open locked cupboards or rooms elsewhere. The whole house is a strange puzzle cabinet, and it all makes sense in context, because the context also covers an infinite pantry with a poltergeist, a pocket universe in the oven, and a fridge whose contents change each time you open it.

This is all good stuff and includes a gentle hunt for recipe cards or ingredients, and mini-games to chop and blend ingredients you have already. Visually it follows the recent trend for PS1-era chunky polygons and that absolutely works too. But that's not what I like most about Creature Kitchen. It is that the calculated domesticity, the warmth of preparing home cooked meals from hand-typed recipe cards kept in a special little box, serves to make the darkness outside the arc of your torchlight all the more menacing. 

See, once you get past the mice, you meet an upended packing box running around on chicken feet. There's a bigfoot of some kind who is attracted by the smell of coffee, and something living in a tree that you think is going to be a spider but turns out to be way more disquieting because it's a thing that has no business being in a tree. There's a dog house with no dog, and at the point you find a squeaky toy, 'What,' you think, 'is going to actually live in the dog house?' The answer may surprise you.

The bigfoot likes breakfast food and, despite the fact he is shy and runs away if you get too close, the ground shakes when he walks. He is 10 feet tall and has eyes like lanterns. There is a giant… thing… that writes poetry. And their existence implies there may be others, who are not shy, and who choose to do things other than write poetry. What else might be living in trees, unseen, that are not supposed to be in trees? When there is a knock at the kitchen door, who is on the other side?

And that is the point, really, because you can't tell who is a monster and who isn't just by looking, and in Creature Kitchen it is in fact you who is the stranger, who has come into an established found family and must earn the breakfast-loving Bigfoot's trust. And in real life a found family is most often made up of people on the fringes, who are weird, who some days can only eat cereal, who feel safer when no one is looking, who have chosen each other when normal society finds them uncomfortable so screw it, lets be weird and write poetry and hide in boxes together. But at least one of us needs to know how to cook food properly, okay?

We know there are monsters outside our torchlight and, by that same token, it makes the light feel more safe. But also, it's just a cool game about making pancakes for bigfoot.