Kiosk Review (Xbox Series X|S & PC)

If there’s one thing that I have learned from Kiosk, it’s that I will never be fit for the culinary arts. Between a murderer on the loose and a sleepy hollow of dreary-eyes customers, rats line the grease-smothered floors, kitchen knives pepper the walls, and an entire pile of burned pancakes flesh out a disused deep fat fryer. But in Kiosk, it doesn’t matter if you can cook, or even if you lack the competence to rustle up a burger and a box of fries in a timely manner. Heck, it doesn’t even matter if your entire restaurant goes up in flames, or if you force a habit of using old sausages to make hot dogs. Funnily enough, the cash continues to flow, and the orders continue to pile up. Eat your heart out, Cooking Simulator. Who says you need to be a sous chef to earn a quick buck?

Kiosk might not be the most graceful of cooking sims on the chopping board, though it is one that makes even the most feeble-minded line chefs feel like paper cutout Gordon Ramsay impersonators. The kitchen, for example, provides you with just about everything that you need in order to make late-night snacks, like burgers, onion rings, nuggets, and even a bottle of beer to wash it all down, naturally. And for the most part, that’s all that Kiosk asks of you: to prepare food, navigate a small kitchen, and occasionally tune in to the latest gossip about a killer who just so happens to favor the local neighborhood.

It goes like this: you arrive at work each night, and then accept orders as they pop up on a board. A brief conversation with a customer later, and you soon find yourself brewing cups of coffee, sizzling meat, and dashing eggs from the pantry to the stove like an amateur baseball player without a glove. You earn a few dollars per order—a currency that, frankly, offers no value to the game whatsoever, given that there are no upgrades to unlock or opportunities to flaunt your ever-expanding wad—and you wait for the beeper to tell you that the shift is over. The night ends, and you return the next day to, well, do it all over again.

Over the course of five or six nights, Kiosk invites you to spectate a murder investigation from behind the “safety” blanket of a kitchen counter. Folks in the town like to talk, but nobody truly knows what on earth is happening. And as for you, well, ignorance is bliss; the money falls into your lap, and you couldn’t care less if you live or die. You burn pancakes, smash plates, and, if you’re really feeling up to it, slaughter a rat with a tomato to pass the time. It honestly doesn’t get much deeper than that.

While the game does label itself as a horror, I wouldn’t say that it’s a naturally scary experience. Granted, it takes a stab in the dark to establish an eerie ambience, but at no point does it leap out of the screen to present you with an utterly horrifying slasher flick to sink your teeth into. A simple jump scare here or there, sure, but that’s about as far as it takes it. Heck, it feels like more of a comedy than anything, given that most of the customers who you meet each night either have a joke to tell you or a random fact that, frankly, adds no value to the overarching narrative whatsoever. Did you know that crocodiles aren’t able to chew? The guy who wanted a plate of pancakes and a soda did.

In spite of its best efforts to deliver an effective fright to the world, Kiosk does manage to provide a simple and oddly satisfying cooking experience. Of course, it’s completely ridiculous, and in no way does it hold a candle to most traditional culinary simulators. Yet, for fast food lovers, it goes down a real treat. Sure, it’s silly and unapologetically unhygienic, but it’s also a lot of fun to fool around with, weirdly. What’s more, it doesn’t aim to overstay its welcome in an effort to spoon feed you copious amounts of recipes to learn. Rather, it gives you a cookbook, a stove, and a fully stocked pantry. The rest, really, is self explanatory.

I won’t say that Kiosk is the best indie horror game in the world, because at the end of the day, it still lacks a certain ingredient that makes good thrillers great. That being said, it is an entertaining one at best, and one that you might just find yourself spending more time with than a lot of other PSX-like slasher flicks on the market. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still a short game that leaves a lot to be desired, but where it lacks in depth and genuine scares, it makes up for in joyful moments of culinary-based humor.

Suffice it to say that, as far as self-serving horrors go, Kiosk doesn’t quite hit the nail on the head with its hit and miss jump scares and lack of suspense. Even still, as a slasher flick that knows how to lighten the mood and take its greatest weaknesses with a grain of salt, I’d say that finds stable ground as a worthy affair.

Verdict

Kiosk might not boast the culinary delights of a full-fledged cooking sim, but it does present a relaxing and, strangely, comical slasher flick that has just as much of a good sense of humor as it does satisfying moments. It might not be a terrifying experience, and I’d be lying if I said that its jump scares are a perfect compliment to a brilliant horror with thought-altering twists. That being said, Kiosk is, in spite of all its flaws and lack of depth, a pleasant experience that has all of the pieces of the puzzle in the right place. It’s just a shame that it isn’t all that scary.

Of course, if you have an appetite for pixel-coated culinary thrillers such as The Boba Teashop and Happy’s Humble Burger Farm, then it’s likely that you’ll enjoy hurling eggs across pantry room floors in Kiosk for an hour or two. Just, eh, don’t expect a natural-born horror, because you won’t find one here.