A cooking game with monsters? Run a restaurant and explore dungeons in Cuisineer, a tasty roguelite

Sometimes you want to play a cozy game where you run a restaurant, and sometimes you want to play a challenging action-RPG about exploring a dungeon. But what if you could play both at that same time? Challenge accepted by Cuisineer! This new cozy roguelite has players trying to run a hit restaurant in order to pay off your parents' debt. But making a five-star restaurant requires the best ingredients, and the only way you'll find those is by going deep into a number of procedurally generated dungeons and fighting the monsters you find there.

PLAY IT OR SKIP IT? Play it if you’re a fan of dungeon crawlers. Monster Menu revolves around a group of adventurers that find themselves trapped in a mysterious dungeon. After a while, they start to get hungry, and they’re ravenous enough to put anything—even monster meat— on the menu. This isn’t the first culinary roguelike I’ve played, but its cooking mechanics are surprisingly deep, and the mix of survival gameplay and dungeon-crawling is satisfying. It’s heavy on grinding, and it’s unlikely to win over players that aren’t fans of the genre, but I still found it to be pretty fun.

Monster Menu: The Scavenger's Cookbook is a game that attempts to blend elements of rogue-like dungeon crawling, survival crafting, cooking sim, and turn-based combat mechanics. It features cel-shaded anime chibi art style and a third person view gameplay. Monster Menu starts with the player created rookie character in his maiden exploration of what is claimed to be a novice dungeon. However, the character quickly finds himself in a life and death situation, with extreme hunger and dehydration as he is lost in the supposedly novice dungeon. As a last resort, he is forced to eat a part of a dying corpse to survive. Yes, underneath this lighthearted chibi art style, there lies a somewhat gruesome and disgusting premise of monster consumption that permeates throughout the whole game.