KuloNiku: Bowl Up! Review – Comfort Food for Cozy Game Fans

KuloNiku: Bowl Up! Review 

KuloNiku: Bowl Up! is a low-poly cooking game with a cool anime style. With inspiration from games like Cooking Mama, Indonesian developer Gambir Studio has cooked up something absolutely special.

In KuloNiku: Bowl Up! you play as one of the nameable premade characters. Choose your gender and get to cooking. Your character has just returned to your hometown, as is tradition with most cozy games. It’s time to return to your roots and carry on your grandmother’s meatball restaurant and legacy.

In the Kitchen

Gameplay involves taking orders from customers daily, with a few off days in between to chat and hangout with friends and head to the meatball brawl. This is the best way to build your restaurant’s reputation and earn vouchers you can use to trade for cool rewards around KuloNiku. Although the story seems like your typical sweet slice of life, our main character seems to have an interesting secret backstory that you can only discover the more you play. Which is setup very nicely in the visual novel bits of the game, where you meet a wide cast of interesting characters.

With your self-proclaimed rival Stella already at your neck from day one, it’s up to you to prove her wrong. In KuloNiku, the cooking system is setup to resemble a first-person cooking station. Well, stations. There’s the actual cooking area, areas for seasoning, and my personal favorite, the chopping area. Here, you actually get to make every slice with your mouse/knife. With customers coming through all day, you’ve got your work cut out.

Customers will request specific things with their orders sometimes. Which means it’s up to you to choose the correct ingredient to match their flavor profiles. But, KuloNiku has a ‘Cozy Mode’ toggle. That allows you to take things at your own pace and prevents customers from getting impatient. So you can bask in the intricacies of slicing vegetables to your leisure.

Out of the Kitchen

On free days, you either hang out with friends and improve your relationship, depending on the choices you make as you talk to them. Which really isn’t too hard at all. Other times, you go to a cooking competition called the ‘MeatBrawl’.

Here, you battle other cooks and people from around town, including your self-proclaimed rival Stella, and try to appease judges who are usually blackmailed to be there. The game is indeed set for goofy humor, and I found myself having a good laugh at a lot of the character interactions. Plus you compete to climb the ranks of the town-wide leaderboard to become the best in the food business.

Beyond competing, you get to decorate your restaurant. Not just the dining section, but your cooking area as well as the front desk. You can grab extra things like bonuses and ingredients from a general store nearby, run by the shy but endlessly hilarious and otaku-coded Ume. You also get to craft your own recipes, improve on them, and unlock new cooking stations and ingredients as you increase your level.

Easy as Meatball Pie

KuloNiku is a delight to play. Controls are easy to learn and grasp. Switching between stations and orders is a breeze. The mechanics, like the chopping area, are smoothly responsive. Though it’s no big deal if you have to keep checking the customer order over and over… and over again. There are a couple of details that are easy to forget here and there. Forgetting the broth is probably a meme at this point. Even with the little note reminding you not to.

KuloNiku is lenient. I was a little worried that the gameplay loop would get repetitive with just cooking over and over and nothing else. But the moments of downtime, the story, recipe crafting, and trying to complete set goals in your journal bring a new layer to gameplay. There’s something fresh to look forward to with each day.

The art is very aesthetically pleasing, too. It should be, it’s a cooking game. But the characters look so fun, well-designed and to the last adorable detail. It’s straight out of a high budget anime. With the availability of the cozy mode, you get to take it all in at your own pace. KuloNiku also has an addictive soundtrack. Fresh, easygoing and cozy. Everything you need in a cooking game.

KuloNiku is a lovely slice of cozy gaming. With pleasing visuals, flexible gameplay, charming characters, and solid storytelling. It’ll have you addicted and sweating over your virtual stoves for hours on end. Definitely one to pick up and add to your cozy collection.

***A PC code was provided by the publisher for review***