Oct 3, 2024Indie Highlight
Hell’s Gate Cafe is an adorable little restaurant management game that you can play for free right in your browser. You play as Baabette, the cute little Baphomet-like character as she’s stuck in Hell. It’s not a fun place to be, at all, and your options are limited. To leave, your only choice is to open up a cafe, earn soul shards, and open the portal out of Hell!
So, you do just that! Run your surprisingly cozy little cafe every day in order to earn soul shards. Purchase items like coffee beans and dragons to roast those beans. An octopus who makes cookie and donut dough will help you serve even more fun treats. Then, interact with the cast of fun characters in Hell’s Gate Cafe as they show up in your cafe. Serve them freshly brewed coffee and fresh baked cookies. Even talk to some of them to learn their stories. Satisfy them, and they’ll pay you in money that you can use to buy more upgrades, but they’ll also leave you precious soul shards! Can you make it out of Hell?
Release Date
You can find Hell’s Gate Cafe on itch.io right now and play for free!
Jul 17, 2024Indie Highlight
KitchenCraft: Cooking Business by LoudKeysGames is a cozy and casual cooking game for Android phones. In this game, you run a restaurant, including the cooking. Take orders from your guests as they decide on which tasty meals they want to eat. Then, head to the kitchen where you’ll cook up over 40 different recipes using over 60 different ingredients. Make use of 10+ kitchen tools like blenders, waffle irons, meat grinders, and the stove top to whip up some delicious meals.
Of course, you need to supply your kitchen with ingredients before you can cook anything. Spend time at the grocery store buying the needed ingredients for each of your recipes. Then, engage in a realistic cooking experience in the kitchen by boiling rice, frying fish, and much more. You can run the restaurant all on your own or even hire staff to help you out, too. Plus, there’s tons of interior upgrades and decorations for the dining area so you can make it comfortable and welcoming to customers. Work hard and you’ll become a profitable restaurant!
You can find KitchenCraft: Cooking Business on Google Play now!
If you prefer cutesy little fashion game for mobile phones, checkout Tiny Boutique!
Sep 18, 2019Feature
I talked about Food Fantasy earlier and how it’s available now for iOS and Android devices therefore I decided to try the free app for myself. Of course a game about unique characters inspired by foods would have me very interested! Food Fantasy is an RPG adventure management game where you have to manage and design your own restaurant, develop new recipes and gather the ingredients, as well as battling your way through the main story-line and side quests. There is so much to do in this game without ever having to wait long periods of time or having to spend real-life currency to advance. I can’t possibly cover all of the details today so I’d like to point out some basics and my favorite characters so far!
Food Souls are exactly what their name implies; souls come to being from food. They have magical abilities that humans have lost over the years and therefore can help us fight against the Fallen Angels that are consuming everything within the world. You have to form contracts with them in order for them to serve you as their Master Attendant and can be quite helpful maintaining a restaurant. Since it happens to be National Cheeseburger Day today (September 18th, 2019), I wanted to point out this awesome Food Soul literally named Hamburger. I haven’t managed to obtain him yet, but perhaps today is the day!
In your new restaurant you will be able to hire one Head Chef, and two assistant Staff members, Food Souls, that can help you out with profits. You’ll want to make sure that those particular Food Souls have Restaurant Skills and not just Combat Skills. Your Food Souls can only last so long, although some bonuses can prolong this, and will need to be swapped out. When their Freshness is at 0, you can stick them in the fridge! The Ice Arena will hold up to 3 Food Souls for free and will gain back their Freshness over a small period of time. If you can’t wait, use some items to speed up the process. In the Research menu, you’ll be creating new recipes or improving the ones you already have, as well as crafting said items mentioned above.
You can only uncover new recipes of your area of choice by trying different food combinations. I recommended using a guide for later on, only because the English translation in this and the infrequent use of the ‘space bar’, make it almost impossible to decipher the hints of locked recipes. If you’re missing ingredients, click on the one you want and it will guide you to the level where you can obtain more. Wait, did I just see a recipe for Stir-Fried Potatoes!?
Every day you’ll come across Daily Goals, Story Missions (main story and side-quests), Trials, etc in order to train your Food Souls and level up. You as the Master Attendant also need to gain levels by accomplishing these tasks in order for your Food Souls to be able to advance, Meaning, you can’t keep fighting if you’ve maxed them out. Your character can even help your Food Souls by learning some abilities via your Talents.
Your companions can go up in level, but also Star Rank when they are ready to Ascend. When you have enough items to Summon a new Food Soul at random, you can either unlock a new character, or get Shards toward one you already have that can be used to Ascend them. Then, by using in-game money, you can also level up your Food Souls’ skills to do more damage or support. It’s a lot to take in at first so I won’t get into it right now.
Combat in this isn’t too stressful as your characters will automatically do their basic attacks. When their energy bar fills, you can use their special attacks, which usually requires you to have characters that support each other (links). You can find out which characters to place together in your team by reading their skills. UR, then SR Rarity Food Souls, are the rarest characters you can obtain and therefore the most powerful. The game won’t tell you this so it takes some digging. Also, when deciding a team, make sure your Captain is the one you want because they start at 50% energy which can give you a huge advantage. Other than that, you’ll be spending a lot of time tapping on the screen at the right time.
I have thoroughly enjoyed “collecting” Food Souls and staring in amazement at their designs in relation to their names. Not only do you get beautiful portraits of each character, but you can also see them in their “chibi” forms which is absolutely adorable! Below are some screenshots of characters I find the most amusing out of the ones I have unlocked. May I present Peeking Duck: a character that battles with several miniature ducks!
I can’t help but feel a kinship to these characters as I have gone through my own journey of becoming more than just food. This game is also very addictive and easy to play while watching TV if you so choose. Ready to try it out for yourselves? You can go here for iOS and here for Android!