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