This new co-op horror is like if the chefs of Overcooked got together for a night of R.E.P.O
Put down that cursed bag of frozen curly fries and come here. I’ve spotted a game you might like. Co-op Kaiju Horror Cooking is essentially the four-player hangout horror of R.E.P.O but instead of ghost hunting you are collecting ingredients to feed a big monster its favourite dish.
“This isn’t a place of honour,” says studio head of Strange Scaffold, Xalavier Nelson Jr. “You aren’t going to be making fancy Overcooked-style dishes. You will be beating a giant rat or a minotaur with a rolling pin, taking an object from their corpse, throwing it onto a grill on a beach, and then firing it into a kaiju’s jaws with a catapult or a manganel.” Checks out.
Strange Scaffold are the studio who made adrenal shooter I Am Your Beast and freaky hotel horror Clickolding (among many others). They were showing off the ravenous kaiju as part of a showcase that would kick off the “Summer of Strange”. Which is sort of like when Nintendo announced the “Year of Luigi”. Everyone laughed back then, but what followed was many consecutive years of Luigi. These are the dark methods of manifesting reality through marketing.
Anyhow, the studio showed off the game with a short playthrough. You play as a cohort of monks who have to cook a meal for a Kaiju while exploring a dungeon for the best ingredients. There are rats who can steal cloves of garlic and tools out of your hands. You can cook a fruit pie using the same flaming torch you use to light your way. At one point in the demo we watched Nelson discover a “spice fall”, a kind of interdimensional portal raining spices from the ceiling. It’ll season anything in your inventory if you stand beneath it, flavours sure to delight (or infuriate) the kaiju.
As with Lethal Company, Phasmophobia and the like, there’s a lot of panicked running around and comical miscommunication. People bleed, flammable puddles are set alight, traps threaten to sever the body parts of the players. If a player dies, their heart pops out. When a team mate brings that heart back to the surface, they can be revived.
Eventually, Nelson gathers a loaf of bread, toasts it, and the gang finally catapult it at the giant monster. Nelson also gets in the medieval catapult (or mangonel) and dies in the sea. “We’ve tried to find the right terminology for the type of catapult thing we’ve got and we’ve learned that that’s just a failing endeavor even with a historian on board.” This would also be why the game’s list of features makes certain notes about food availability. “No tomatoes,” it reads, “since they were only introduced to Europe in the 16th century.”
As with a lot of co-op streamer bait, there’s proximity voice chat baked into the game, and you’re not meant to hear everyone all the time. But without radios the studio needed another way for players to talk as they roam from cobwebbed pantry to cobwebbed pantry. So there are “speaking tubes” you have to talk into to chat over distances. A tinny reverb adds a ghostly feeling to the sound of voices flowing through them.
It’s all openly reminiscent of the ever-popular and streamer-friendly co-op horror games already mentioned. Last week some bozo in the bowels of the internet derisively called this subgenre of games “friendslop” – a judgy yet admittedly catchy phrase that sneers at the relatively low development costs and roughhewn nature of such games. Developers and fans on social media subsequently had a shit-fit defending this type of game, as if the term itself threatened the millions of sales Peak has already achieved. By contrast, Nelson doesn’t really care about the drama around the word, and is more buoyed by the idea that a genre has simply been born.
“I think it is an interesting way of talking about this set of highly consumable, highly digestible, low-cost, low-commitment multiplayer experiences. I’m not offended by it. I’m not particularly excited by it either. I just think that it’s interesting that this is enough of a subcategorization of things that players and press and content creators have found a word for it.”
I’m not sure we’ll see “friendslop” become neutral in the same way that “walking simulator” has become. (It too began as a jeering insult, about games deemed to lack enough action and player verbs, yet is now basically divorced from that negativity.) Whether “friendslop” sticks around or dissolves into obscurity, it’s reassuring to see that at least one developer isn’t fazed by the name-calling.
“I hope to make a game, as with all of our games, that is more than the cheap joke,” says Nelson, “but also very silly and a little janky and lives up to being just another cool thing we made.”
Co-op Kaiju Horror Cooking is out July 29th and Strange Scaffold promise “a minimum of two months of post-launch support, expanding and updating the game”.
