One of the best-reviewed new games on Steam right now is about feeding raccoons and cryptids with the cosmic, Lynchian oven of your eerie woodland house

A raccoon sitting in a rocking chair on a porch in Creature Kitchen. — (Image credit: The Rat Zone)

Even in our era of accelerating electric woe, there's a timeless comfort to be found in the simple act of cooking for a friend. The fulfilment of providing that basic hospitality is what developer The Rat Zone is trying to capture in Creature Kitchen, a laid-back cooking sim that released on Steam last week: It's just you, the ingredients scattered around your inscrutable woodland home, the yawning cosmic void contained within your oven, and the unsated hungers of the night creatures answering the call of the culinary witching hour.

Okay, so it's not exactly the conventional image of neighborly camaraderie, but still—people seem to like it! At time of writing, 99% of Creature Kitchen's 707 reviews on Steam have been positive since its February 6 launch, leaving it with an impressive Overwhelmingly Positive rating. And that's even accounting for the legged, mouthless egg-being!

An egg-shaped cryptid sits at the kitchen table while mice emerge from a hole in the wall in Creature Kitchen. — (Image credit: The Rat Zone)

Oh, I should note: There's a legged, mouthless egg-being. In addition to satisfying the food cravings of more mundane forest critters like crows, toads, and sandwich-hungry raccoons, Creature Kitchen also has you play host for a collection of unsettling cryptids.

And the trees whisper. And there are lights in the woods. There are meal recipes hidden beneath sigils, there are glyph-based puzzles in the cabinets, and there's an unfathomable engine installed in the bathtub. And, again, there's outer space in the oven.

If you're struggling to make sense of all that, I don't know what to tell you. I just flip the eggs and make toast. All that Lynchian stuff is above my pay grade. But if you're interested in picking apart its mysteries for yourself, reviewers say it'll only take you a couple hours—and by all accounts, enjoying the throwback art style and easygoing (if eerie) atmosphere along the way is well worth the $8 price tag. That's a small price to pay for the joy of feeding a friendly face. Even if it doesn't have a mouth.

Creature Kitchen is available on Steam now.

Lincoln has been writing about games for 12 years—unless you include the essays about procedural storytelling in Dwarf Fortress he convinced his college professors to accept. Leveraging the brainworms from a youth spent in World of Warcraft to write for sites like Waypoint, Polygon, and Fanbyte, Lincoln spent three years freelancing for PC Gamer before joining on as a full-time News Writer in 2024, bringing an expertise in Caves of Qud bird diplomacy, getting sons killed in Crusader Kings, and hitting dinosaurs with hammers in Monster Hunter.

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