Manage your own little slice of restaurant life in the visual novel-inspired Culina: Hands in the Kitchen, now seeking support on Kickstarter and Steam’s Greenlight.
In truth, calling Culina: Hands in the Kitchen a visual novel would be selling the game’s ambitions short. What Culina is, rather, is a restaurant simulation where the food is far from the only thing on the menu when it comes to gameplay. Managing your character’s relationships is just as important as managing their kitchen, and can mean the difference between becoming the next Wolfgang Puck or serving second-rate kebabs out of the back of an old Astrovan.
I might have made that last part up.
Manage your food and your relationships in an effort to make the most successful restaurant you possibly can. The better your relationships are, the more items you have at your disposal to improve your food, making careful consideration of how you treat your friends and employees a very important element of not only the game’s narrative, but its actual mechanics as well. Also, you get to stare at some quite nice hand-drawn artwork the entire time you play, which is always great.
If the idea of a visual novel/restaurant management sim appeals to your sense of the quirky and wonderful (and how could it not?) Culina: Hands in the Kitchen is seeking support on both Kickstarter and Steam Greenlight right now, with hopes of coming simultaneously to the PC, Mac, Linux, and even Ouya platforms. The developers have big plans for any and all crowdfunding they get.
Funds raised using our Kickstarter will firstly be used to fund the art that we need in order to get the game completed. In addition, to give our game the ability to move to multiple platforms that our current engine doesn’t support, we are porting the game to Unity. This will also allow us to add more gameplay options that would be difficult with our current engine. A part of the funds will also be used to create promotional materials for the game, as well as general polish to make the game as great as we can before release.
With a ton of work already done on the game, Culina: Hands in the Kitchen is shaping up to be a great freshman effort from the small indie team working on it (most of whom seem to share the last name Doran.) If the mere idea of an empathetic restaurant sim/novel isn’t enough to convince you the game is intriguing, though, in a stroke of genius the team behind Culina have revived the almost non-existent demo, with a short prequel to the game available on the game’s official site for free.