CREATURE KITCHEN
I love indie horror, so when I was walking through the Seattle Indies booth at GeekFest West and noticed someone playing a game where they were wandering through tall grass with a flashlight, I thought, “Yes, I’m definitely coming back to this one.” Little did I know, the game that caught my eye wasn’t just a horror title—it was a creature-collecting cooking sim about making meals for some of my favorite nighttime animals. Creature Kitchen by The Rat Zone is, honestly, everything I love wrapped up in a video game.
Set in a cozy cabin deep in the woods, Creature Kitchen is a sandbox adventure where you befriend local wildlife by feeding them their favorite snacks. When you arrive at the cabin, you find a Polaroid camera to document the creatures you meet as you explore the night looking for hungry visitors. While I originally thought it was a horror game, Creature Kitchen turned out to be surprisingly cozy. You can kick back, set the radio to a chill station, and get to work.
From a familiarly shy raccoon to a less familiar oddity called “Mothman,” each creature has its own food preferences—and it’s your job to search the cabin for ingredients and cook their favorite dishes. As you fill up your photo album with pictures of these nocturnal friends, you’ll unlock clues to what they like to eat. But Creature Kitchen isn’t just a cooking sim; the cabin is full of puzzles that unlock new recipes. If you manage to cook a creature’s favorite meal, they’ll return the favor with things that help you unlock even more of the cabin. And trust me, there’s no shortage of locked doors, cabinets, and drawers to poke through.
From its original soundtrack to its nostalgic early-2000s graphics, Creature Kitchen is one of those games you can’t help but get pulled into. I’ll be honest—I was completely immersed in the demo at GeekFest West this weekend. I had more than one teammate check in on me because I’d been sitting there for so long. This game is a gem, and I’m so excited to share it with anyone looking for a bite-sized, cozy-but-creepy cooking adventure.
Creature Kitchen is available to wishlist on Steam and is set to release at the end of this year.
Puppet: This is Puppet, and I am interviewing one of the developers of Creature Kitchen. Hi, how are you?
Chris: Really good, thanks for asking. How are you doing today?
Puppet: I'm good. It is day two. Yup, yup. Um, so I have some questions for you. First off, who are you and what are you working on? What do you do?
Chris: Yeah, so I'm Chris Onorati with the Rat Zone. We're an indie team of about four of us now, and we've been making games for the last few years. Our goal is to make, like, small, little, like one to two hour long games, like short, little fun experiences. Yeah, the other teammates work in the big triple-A land industry. I'm actually an educator down here at a game college. It's called DigiPen. So this is, like, our side, like a little hustle that we all enjoy doing. Yeah.
Puppet: That's so cool. That's fun. Yeah, I've heard lots of things about DigiPen. They've been around for a long time. Yeah.
Chris: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. 30 years, I think, or something like that.
Puppet: Oh, wow.
Chris: I think it was just 30 this year. Yeah.
Puppet: That’s amazing. Wow, very cool. Um, so what originally got you into indies, like, how did you end up here?
Chris: Oh, so I was working with a studio that was over remote. I wasn't over in Europe. They're all based in Europe. I was working with them for about six years on a game. And then after doing that for so long, I was just like, you know, I think I want to do smaller stuff now and then, myself and the other team members at The Rat Zone. We all met in college because we all went to DigiPen. So we made games there together, student games. And we all said like, hey, when the time's right, do we want to come back together and start making these indie games. And when I decided to leave that remote European job, I contacted them and was like, “Hey, is now a good time?” And just happened to be for everyone, yeah.
Puppet: That's wonderful, especially as adults. You know, it's like so hard to find a time to even get together.
Chris: We got lucky that worked out. Yeah.
Puppet: It was meant to be. It was meant to be. Can you tell me about the other team members?
Chris: Yeah! So there's Will, and he's an artist. He does a lot of our art and technical art. And then Ashley, who does a lot of our music, and some of like, the fancy graphics programming that goes way above my head. And then Rose, who is illustrations, and 3D art. So like any of the 2d artwork you see in the games and stuff like that, and store page assets and stuff like that, yeah.
Puppet: Cool. Very cool. So is it just you guys?
Chris: Yeah, just the four of us right now. Yeah.
Puppet: Very cool. Wow. We love small teams.
Chris: Yep.
Puppet: That's awesome. So what are you most Well, first off, tell me about creature kitchen. What is it?
Chris: Yeah, so this is an idea that came from Rose actually. This is our third game, and how we've been doing it is each of us takes a turn to like, pitch the game idea, so we each get a chance to be like, “This is what we wanted to make.” And the idea of the game is, you're in the spooky house, like in the middle of the woods at the dead of night, and there's creatures that come up to the kitchen and that you discover in the house, and your job is to figure out, like, what food they want and how you make it. It's kind of like an escape room vibes meets cooking sim, yeah, yeah.
Puppet: Yeah, I just demoed the game, and I just, I loved it.
Chris: Happy to hear, yeah.
Puppet: Yeah, yeah. I love cooking in games, and I love escape rooms, and it has a horror vibe to it.
Chris: Yeah, yeah, it feels like Luigi’s Mansion kind of, if you're familiar with that, because we're not gonna jump scare you, but it's spooky. Yeah.
Puppet: It’s so funny you say that because I was in the pantry and all the stuff came off and I got scared.
Chris: I saw you jump with that.
Puppet: I'm a jumper. So okay, what can you tell me a bit about the process for this game in particular. Like, what were the conversations that happened that led you guys to make this?
Chris: Yeah, so Rose, Will, and Rose, they live basically out in the woods. Like, that house is a pretty good representation of their house, to be honest. And they have raccoons that visit their back porch and everything. And like deer and coyotes and whatnot. And they were like, Rose was like, I really want to make a game about like this feeding them, because I know I can't feed them in real life, but that's bad, but I really want to, so can we make a game about it? And we had a list of creatures like that they've seen, like, you know, fake creatures like Mothman and stuff like that. That's also in the game. Yeah, if you keep playing, you'll get some weird creatures that come up. And we started out small, and then we just kept finding creatures that we wanted to add to it. So we started out with six creatures, and now we're up to like, 12, I think, in the game. So it's just grown in how many animals there are in there. Yeah.
Puppet: Yeah, yeah. That's so cool. We love making little creature friends.
Chris: Yes, yes, we do.
Puppet: I'm sure, yeah. And so it sounds like you guys are continually, like, continually like, adding.
Chris: Yeah, yeah. So we've been working on it for about, like, a little bit more than a year now, at this point, and we're looking to put because if we could keep adding creatures, we would forever so, but we have to stop eventually. So we're looking to put out probably, like, around the end of this year. I would say, expect to see it out around then, yeah.
Puppet: Yeah. Very cool. Yeah. So for my next question, um, if you could go back in time and change one thing, or give yourself some advice when you first started, what would it be?
Chris: Do you mean this game or, just like making games in general?
Puppet: Let's do both.
Chris: Okay, okay, uh, games in general, I would say, whatever you're thinking of, cut it in half right now, because, like, you always have, like, a huge idea. It's way too much. And our first games back in college, the first game we made together was going to have twelve bosses, and then became six bosses, and then became four bosses, and ended up being three bosses. So, a little bit more than we've had planned for that one, so, you know, and that's what we're doing with these now, we're planning small instead of grandiose ideas. With this game, if I were to go back in time, you know, there was a bug for a very long time with how one of the mini games worked. So if I could go back in time and tell myself about that, it would have saved about two months of my life. There's a there's a mixing bowl in the game, and there was a bug that, when you used it, it would duplicate items infinitely, and that, and that took forever to figure out why that was going on.
Puppet: Oh, dang well, as the player, that kind of sounds nice, though.
Chris: Oh, players liked it. Yeah. Players absolutely liked it.
Puppet: A convenient bug.
Chris: Yeah, very.
Puppet: Well. That's all I got today. Do you have anything else you want me to know or…?
Chris: Nah, just, um, if you're interested in checking out the game, it's on Steam. You can wish list it, and then hopefully, well, you'll see it out in December, January, something like that.
Puppet: All right. Thank you so much. Have a great con.
Chris: You too. Thank you for your time.
