Woah, this title has unexpectedly become the leitmotif of my vacation 😃
As the temperatures outside hovered around 38-39-40 for days, I could spend some time in the shelter of the air conditioning in a dark, dead-end kitchen, feeding an unnamed toothy beast that has a French accent and at least two extra pairs of limbs.
This is an incredibly charming and very intelligently crafted game that draws inspiration from Inscryption, Clover Pit, and even Balatroa.
The goal of the game is to assemble food pieces into bento boxes in a tetris-like manner and feed an unknown entity that speaks to you from the pipe in the kitchen - namely, it is getting hungrier and hungrier, and you have the honor of solving this problem. Besides the Bento, you buy and assemble tools and various upgrades with which you strategically try to create a broken-build engine to finish the game more easily. Of course, there are also some secrets, a creepy story, and indeed both a wrong and a right ending to the game.
After you feed the hungry creature enough, it offers you an exit from the kitchen, thus ending the level (?), but you can also stay and keep assembling bento boxes, building the engine, and reaching further incremental goals that your hungry "friend" sets.
The sound is so-so, and the graphics are somewhat low-poly / PSX-like, stylistically quite similar to Clover Pit, but unlike it, this game gives you much more influence over how successful you will be – while Clover Pit (element, slot machine) often feels completely random (and thus somewhat unfair), here with a smart setup of tools and upgrades, you can create a great engine and completely control the narrative.
This is not a game you will obsessively play for 3 years; this is a game you will give 5-10 days of your life to, and all the while, you will be smiling gently, admiring the clever systems that the author has embedded in it.
It's fun to feed the beast!
A copy of the game for review purposes was provided by the publisher Black Lantern Collective
