Do you remember ‘Teamfight Manager’, who becomes the manager of an e-sports club and runs the team? Although it was a small-scale work developed by two brothers, it is a game that has attracted the attention of many gamers with its solid system and contents. It spread through word of mouth and has received over 4,000 very positive Steam reviews to date.
The developer, Tim Samoyed, said in an interview at the time that their goal was to make a game that was unconditionally fun, putting everything else aside. Now, about two years later, at BIC 2023, we were able to meet their new work, ‘Kitchen Crisis’.
Nam Hyun-bin, developer of Team Samoyed, gave a short introduction about Kitchen Crisis, saying, “It’s a game where you have to satisfy the aliens as much as possible while thinking about the efficient arrangement of tools in the kitchen and the strengthening of ingredients.”
As can be seen from the strange combination of keywords kitchen and alien, from the moment I first encountered the new work, I felt that it was definitely out of the ordinary. If the previous work, Team Fight Manager, focused on the well-organized management elements and melted down the e-sports elements while adding Team Samoyed’s own colors, this work seems to have completely reinterpreted the defense genre and rebuilt it from scratch.
First of all, the game has a pretty unique setting in which the player, captured by aliens, cooks and satisfies the aliens in order to protect humanity. As a defense genre game, the dish has the concept of a tower attacking enemies. What’s special here is that it doesn’t just end with placing the dishes, it’s that you have to trim the ingredients according to the recipe and go through various cooking methods to attack the enemy.
To put it simply, to satisfy the impatient alien customer, you prepare the dish at high speed and put it on the shelf, and the alien customer passes by and eats the dish and is satisfied, just like in a drive-thru. He said that the name of the game, Kitchen Crisis, was also made to express the story and gameplay situation in which the main character who was kidnapped had to provide food quickly.
The more complex the recipe is, the more satiety the guest will feel when they eat it, but it is necessary to have the equipment to prepare the dish and organize the flow. Unlike typical tower defense games where you can break it properly by simply placing towers with high attack power, Kitchen Crisis requires you to defend while calculating the equipment that will allow your towers to function properly. It had a big difference from existing tower defense games that are played like an idle game simply by installing.
Regarding this, developer Nam Hyun-bin expressed the difficulty of development, saying, “As in the previous works, I tried to make something new this time, so there were not many parts that I could refer to in the existing games.” It was difficult in that when I ran into a problem, I had to solve it on my own, but I think that as a result, an original work was born because I went through this process.
What I felt while experiencing the game was that I didn’t feel the looseness, which is one of the chronic regrets of existing tower defense games. This is because the process of preparing new recipes and arranging kitchen tools suitable for them is repeated to satisfy the aliens that become stronger as the stages progress.
Cooking is automatically made, but in the end, it is the player’s responsibility to efficiently plan the route, so the efficiency of defense varies greatly depending on how the kitchen tools are arranged. Also, collecting gold and strengthening food ingredients or kitchen tools had strategic elements, so there were a lot of things to think about.
On the other hand, there are a lot of recipes, but there are restrictions on strengthening, so I was concerned that the recipes might not be fixed as the second half progressed. Regarding this, he said that he is designing to induce as many different recipe builds as possible so that it does not become fixed. It’s currently in a demo version, so there aren’t many options, but he said he’s thinking about making his own creative builds.
Developer Nam Hyun-bin said, “As more gamers get to know us, I think their expectations will grow. We will try to make a fun game to live up to those expectations.” Kitchen Crisis is currently halfway developed, and like its predecessor, it will be officially released on both PC (Steam) and Nintendo Switch platforms without going through the Early Access stage.
Currently, the demo version of the game is available on the BIC official website until September 14th, so if you are looking for a unique tower defense genre game, we recommend giving it a try.
