When it comes to cooking, couch co-op games, I love trying out new ones! Cannibal Cuisine is one of these types of games, however, there is a twist. Instead of cooking up lovely dishes for some sort of crowd, you are actually killing tourists and cooking their meat to feed a strange spirit monster. Yeah, it’s a wild ride.
The story behind Cannibal Cuisine is pretty easy to follow. You and your friends are in some sort of tribe. In the tribe, you have angered a spirit, who will not eat you as long as you keep them fed with someone else. So, you’ve all decided to lure tourists to your island, kill them, and cook up their meat. These spirits are quite picky about what they want, and their patience, but unlike other cooking games, the recipes are not so complex.
Instead, you will be trying to kill off the tourists, using your weapons, so that you have stuff to actually cook. Before each level, you can change your character, and add a special move. Some of these moves help cooking; like fire breathing to make the food cook faster, while others help you fight off tourists, like the stomp that freezes everyone. You can also get a dash, which is useful when it comes to the various waterways dividing up the levels.
Dann and I played local two player, where Dann focused on killing off as many tourists as he could, and I focused on cooking. Cooking itself is just taking the items over to the fire, adding the meat into a kebab with veggies or fruits to fulfill the orders. You can make kebabs quite big, so you will need to ensure that you pick up the items off of the fire before adding more on — unlike other multiplayer co-op cooking games, where you can switch an item with another.
When it comes to the game itself, Cannibal Cuisine does feel like a game that does not scale down to two players. Despite being able to play with just the two of us, we struggled a lot. Often, the distance to carry food around was too much, and the timers were hard to make. I never had to use the fire ability, as by the time I grabbed some meat and came near the grill, the item I just placed on would be done.
Dann found that the dash button just didn’t work sometimes. And, every time one of us died, it was taken from our score. The tourists, once you start killing them, actually fight back. You end up with a health bar, and have the option of eating raw meat to help heal your health, which is hard to juggle and doesn’t add much to the game when you only have two players trying to do everything. With that said, we just didn’t enjoy Cannibal Cuisine.
It is also worth mentioning that the Pause button doesn’t work — and the game’s timer will continue, the tourists will continue attacking, as the game is paused. No idea why this is, and it further feels like it adds to the lack of polish in this game. We really wanted to enjoy our time with Cannibal Cuisine, but I suppose we will have to give it another go when we have more friends over.
You can find Cannibal Cuisine on Xbox, Playstation, Nintendo Switch and PC.
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