I love cooking in games, even if those games aren't really about cooking. Recently I spent $1.3 million to bake a single cake Farming Simulator 22, and prior to that I baked thousands of cookies in city builder Patron (though I wouldn't let anyone eat them). I also deep fried dozens of ingredients into a single horrifying meal in restaurant sim Recipe for Disaster—and it was, indeed, a disaster.
Two new cooking sims caught my watchful eye this week, mainly because they have one gruesome gimmick in common. In both games, you use an unconventional method to fill your kitchen with delicious meat: You murder your customers and use them as ingredients in the meals you serve. Gross, yes. But I can't deny the appeal of saving money on butcher bills.
On the lighter side of restaurant murder, Godlike Burger still manges to be a cute and cartoony cooking sim, possibly because you're running a burger joint on a space station and instead of killing humans for meat, you're chopping up aliens. Somehow murdering weird aliens doesn't feel quite as terrible as chopping up actual humans. As you murder your way through the campaign with meat cleavers and carefully laid traps, you can level up your kitchen, unlock new recipes, open restaurants on different planets, and bring new meaning to the term "secret sauce."
It's a bright and arcadey management game with a bit of stealth thrown in (to sneakily dispatch aliens), and you need to make sure the cops don't catch on to your scheme or you could wind up in space prison. Godlike Burger is out now on Steam if you want to try your hand at the Diner Dash-style game.
On the more gruesome and bloody side of things, Ravenous Devils (which launches this Friday) is a stylish-looking horror cooking simulator. You manage a tailor shop but do a lot more than just sell clothing: As customers arrive to browse for new duds, you brutally kill them, take their outfits for cleaning and resale, and dump their bodies into a chute so they'll fall into the kitchen below. There you butcher 'em, cook 'em, and serve 'em from the restaurant on the first floor. Now that's what I call vertical integration.
It's grim stuff with a Sweeny Todd theme, but it does look fun, and as you slaughter and cook your customers you'll gain access to new recipes and upgrade both your murderous tailor shop and your cannibalisatic kitchen. Ravenous Devils arrives April 29. Hope you've got an appetite for it.
