Celebrate Thanksgiving by cooking mutant rats in the post-apocalypse

Rat on a stick. Vulture meat. Irradiated carp. Monster eggs. These may not sound like the ideal ingredients for a Thanksgiving meal, but it's the post-apocalypse and you should probably be thankful you're alive to eat anything at all. 

Cooking Simulator's next DLC pack will have you occasionally putting down your spatula and picking up a gun to hunt rats and mutants for food. It takes place after some very big bombs have dropped and the planet has become a radioactive wasteland. And it's got a release date, too: Cooking Simulator: Shelter is planned for November 18, just in time for the holiday.

"After many years of wandering the wastelands looking for your long-lost family, you’ve arrived in an area known as Sector 12," reads the DLC's Steam page. "You could use the nearby radio dish to contact them, but you won’t be able to fix it without the help of the locals. As the only skilled cook in the Sector, you’ll become the main food supplier for its inhabitants. Bake, cook, fry, and grill mutant meat, glowing mushrooms, and other post-nuclear ingredients. Find your family while bringing back hope and prosperity to the wastelands with your tasty and nutritious food!"

In your cozy little underground shelter you'll be able to cook meals, store ingredients, and grow mushrooms and other radioactive plants. And from time to time you'll open the hatch, step out into the wasteland, and hunt for some mutant creatures to add a bit of protein to your meals. How else would you cook delicious-sounding dishes like Creamy Garlic Rat?

(Image credit: Big Cheese Studio)

As you cook and scavenge for mutant meat and glowing mushrooms, you'll be able to sell your meals to trade caravans that travel between the few settlements in the area. Fill enough orders for hungry survivors, and they'll start to help you track down your family. If you're not interested in the story campaign, there's also a sandbox mode where you can just cook mutated rats and glowing mushrooms to your heart's content.

And honestly, the meals all do look pretty tasty, even if they're made from mutated rodents. There's no price listed yet for Cooking Simulator: Shelter, but it'll be 15% off at launch. Naturally you'll need the base game, Cooking Simulator, to run it.

Christopher Livingston
Senior Editor

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.