Kiosk

At first glance, Kiosk looks like an average bargain basement food simulator. Your job is to serve customers at a small food stand that closes at midnight. The changeover was abrupt - the last guy quit out of the blue, so it’s a bit of a scramble to get a new hire. This explains why you start with no training.

All you have are the materials in the Kiosk itself, and a cookbook that guides you through how to prepare food. A call from the boss tells you how to use it, and that’s it. The rest is up to you.

Fortunately, the game doesn’t really need a tutorial. Even the cookbook only needs glanced at once or twice before the simple recipes are memorized. It’s relatively straightforward to figure out how to chop ingredients or cook them. The challenge isn’t in cooking ingredients or serving guests. It may well be in staying alive.

Superficial Scares

While there’s no tutorial, the game goes easy on the player at first. Scares are kept to a few creepy shadows, almost out of the corner of one’s eyes, and the moody atmosphere of the game itself. This works to keep the game feeling spooky while the story itself builds.

As you learn how to serve up burgers, hotdogs and cold beers, the customers drop hints about that creepy storyline.

Presumably, the scares will get deeper and better as the storyline progresses. The demonstration ended on a very dramatic note, perhaps a taste of what’s to come. Meanwhile, the game plays a lot like typical sims such as Cooking Simulator or perhaps a low-poly Fast Food Simulator. Players can interact with materials, including cook the meat and hotdogs, chop lettuce, and assemble ingredients.

Smoothly Running Game

It turns out, something happened to the previous person working at the kiosk. Your goal is to balance flipping burgers and investigating what happens. There are hints spread through the Kiosk if you know where to look.

These hints take what would otherwise be an average game to the next level. There are few to no bugs in the demonstration of the game. Gameplay itself is smooth and logical. The cooking aspects of the game are logical, and easy to get the hang of. There’s just enough customers to keep you busy, while also leaving you brief moments to search the kiosk for clues.

Every now and again, something happens to shake up gameplay that needs to be dealt with, but the game could be played in the upcoming “forever mode” without losing its luster.

Pros:

• Thoughtfully designed food crafting
• Deep storyline
• Tastefully scary

Cons:

• None