Sated is a grimy cooking roguelike about preparing meals for biblically accurate horrors beyond knowing, and I'm signed up already

I'll level with you pals: I'm already incredibly into everything Sated—which just got a world premiere at the PC Gaming Show—is doing. It bills itself as "a grimy, hypnotic rogue-like where you descend into a dripping megastructure to cook increasingly grotesque delicacies for an ever-hungrier monster." Well, that's all I need to hear. Sign me up.

The thing is: you are a cursed chef on a moving tram that keeps stopping at new monsters with new, dreadful culinary demands, "From angelic horrors begging for battery soup to submarine sharks craving marine delicacies," per the press release.

You've got to cater to their demands using ingredients that ought not to be ingredients in a kitchen that ought not to be a kitchen. Your companion is "A sentient, gambling-obsessed refrigerator that works as a psychotic slot machine", dispensing ingredients according to the whims of RNG.

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So, you know, all pretty standard.

This is a roguelike, so you will absolutely be making poor decisions, or getting undermined by RNG, and ending up as a replacement meal for some disappointed and monstrous punter. There's a dash of Slay The Spire: you pick your tram's way down through cooking hell in a way that reminds me of the StS map. Oh, and you can, of course, build a thick stack of modifiers to tilt things in your favour.

So far the dev has explicitly named "Turn every ingredient into gold, double your satiety, transform everything into Amalgam, or just embrace chaos," as possible options—but I suspect you're gonna end up on the menu yourself a few times before you get into a proper horrible groove.

I'm very into this thing's whole vibe. It's biblically nasty in a way that scratches something deep and strange in my brain, and the games it namechecks as inspirations (Buckshot Roulette, Balatro, and Inscryption) are all bonafide bangers. Consider me on board to see what the heck this thing is when it comes out. Until then, you can track it on Steam.

One of Josh's first memories is of playing Quake 2 on the family computer when he was much too young to be doing that, and he's been irreparably game-brained ever since. His writing has been featured in Vice, Fanbyte, and the Financial Times. He'll play pretty much anything, and has written far too much on everything from visual novels to Assassin's Creed. His most profound loves are for CRPGs, immersive sims, and any game whose ambition outstrips its budget. He thinks you're all far too mean about Deus Ex: Invisible War.