There are two things I admire about developer Strange Scaffold. The first is the speed at which it makes games, often putting out multiple titles within a year. The second is its Ronseal approach to names, with nominative highlights including Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator, and An Airport For Aliens Currently Run By Dogs. My favourite example, though, is the newly announced Co-op Kaiju Horror Cooking, a cooperative horror game which, you’ll be unsurprised to hear, is about cooking meals for kaiju.
There are, admittedly, a couple of extra wrinkles that I didn’t expect from the title. Primarily, you and up to three other friends play as medieval monks (order unspecified), using your Gregorian chanting skills to summon gigantic creatures like a mountain-sized bear from the ocean.
Once the ravenous kaiju is summoned, you have ten minutes to assemble a meal fit for a towering terror of the deep, before firing it into the monster’s mouth with a catapult. This is the second thing I didn’t expect from the title, although on reflection, how else would you feed a bear the size of the Matterhorn?
As for what you feed the beast, you locate ingredients within a ‘reality-bending labyrinth’ (which I assume is located in the undercroft of your monastery, though it isn’t clear). These range from humble foodstuffs like chicken, to more exotic fare like minotaur meat. Acquiring these comes with considerable risk, as minotaurs are not known for handing out their own sirloin willingly.
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Along the way, you’ll also need to dodge traps, and help yourself to whatever treasures have been left by your forebears in those dusty halls (which doesn’t seem like especially monkish behaviour, but I suppose an inconvenient marriage wasn’t the only reason Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries.)
There’s a trailer for the game you can watch above. While I like the concept, I reckon it could do with a bit more polish, though that doesn’t seem to be much of a concern among fans of this style of chaotic cooperative experience.
Co-op Kaiju Horror Cooking will have 13 levels when it launches on July 29, but if you fancy getting hands on with it sooner, Strange Scaffold is currently running a playtest, which you can request access to via the game’s Steam page.