Japanese Ramen Simulator: six cooks, a food critic, and shuriken for the thieves

There is a sentence in this game's description that stopped me dead: during business hours, thieves may target the money in your register, and fires can break out without warning. Use shuriken, fire extinguishers and other items to get your shop out of trouble.

Shuriken. In a restaurant simulator.

The game has no firm release date yet, and it will arrive in early access. No score today, but there is a lot to say about the serious part, which really is serious.

The cooking is properly simulated

That is what separates it from the wave of restaurant sims where you drag a dish icon onto a table icon.

You prepare the soup, you cook the noodles, you arrange the toppings so each bowl matches exactly what was ordered.

And here is what you are judged on: the texture of the noodles, the temperature of the soup, the aroma, the umami of your ingredients, and the time taken to serve.

Five criteria, three of which are not timers. A simulator that grades the aroma and umami of a bowl is a simulator that has decided the recipe matters as much as the speed, and in a genre built entirely on the rush, that is a position.

Plating is physics-based and the broth ingredients vary, so two bowls identical on paper do not look alike on the plate. You can recreate your favourite ramen or try something nobody has ever seen.

And it is not only ramen

Gyoza, rice bowls, beer, and other things for the menu.

The announced details are telling: you watch the browning on your gyoza, and you pour beer looking for the right balance of liquid and foam.

Ingredients prepared for ramen get reused over rice, to make a char siu don for instance. That is an idea about kitchen economy rather than menu design: your prep does not serve a dish, it serves a menu.

Up to six players

That is the number that interests me. Not two, not four. Six.

A six-person kitchen is where a restaurant game stops being a test of individual dexterity and becomes an organisational problem. You need someone on the broth, someone on the noodles, someone front of house, and someone who has understood nothing.

You switch between a first-person view that immerses you in the cooking and a third-person view that shows your character and surroundings. The studio notes that this is also a comfort question for people prone to motion sickness in first person, and I appreciate that being said plainly rather than buried in an accessibility menu.

The critic, and the shuriken

Two events disrupt the service.

A demanding food critic may visit. You then fine-tune the aroma, umami and toppings to serve a bowl that earns their approval. That is a good escalation idea: everything else in the game trains you to be fast, and the exam asks you to be accurate.

And there are the incidents. Theft from the register, a sudden fire. With tools to respond, including those shuriken.

I have no idea how that feels in the hand. Either it is the streak of madness that stops the game becoming a service chore, or it is a layer of arcade dropped onto a serious simulation that did not ask for it.

What will need watching

Progression. You design a menu and lay out your shop to taste. The question is whether the shop is a decorating space or a constraint space, which is to say whether the layout genuinely changes the service.

The learning curve. A game that grades noodle texture has to give clear feedback when you get it wrong, otherwise the criteria become disguised randomness.

And early access. The store page does not announce a date yet. A cooking simulator for up to six players is a lot of systems to hold together over a network, and it is exactly the sort of project whose launch build decides its reputation.

I have a particular fondness for games that take seriously a gesture everybody assumes is simple. Making a good bowl of ramen is a profession, and a game that treats it as one interests me a great deal more than yet another timed burger stack.

With, as a bonus, the option of throwing a shuriken at a thief. We are not going to complain.

Got a team of six to run a kitchen? Recruitment is open on the InsertCoins Discord.