Kitchen War

Exploring the Watara Supervision's quirky library often unearths games that take mundane settings and inject them with classic arcade weirdness. Kitchen War, released in 1992 and developed by Bon Treasure (a studio operating alongside the ubiquitous Thin Chen Enterprise and Sachen teams), is a prime example. Rather than sending players to deep space or ancient ruins, it presents an action platformer set entirely around culinary combat. It is a wonderfully bizarre little title that tasks you with defending your workspace from an onslaught of oversized household pests.

You are placed in the rather unenviable shoes of a frantic chef - who, depending on how you interpret the chunky pixel art, looks somewhat like an anthropomorphic tomato. Your beloved kitchen has been invaded by a menagerie of vermin, including spiders, snails, and oddly aggressive mice. Instead of merely trying to reach an exit door at the far end of the screen, your primary objective in each of the game's six stages is to hunt down and exterminate a set quota of these creeping intruders before they overwhelm you. It is a survival loop that feels right at home with early eighties arcade mechanics, demanding constant movement and spatial awareness.

Because simply jumping on a giant spider is not an option, you have to rely on the tools of your trade. The platforms are littered with various kitchen utensils that you can pick up and hurl at the oncoming swarm. You begin by lobbing plates across the screen, but can also arm yourself with forks and heavy ladles to use as makeshift projectiles. The combat requires a surprising amount of timing. Your chef moves with a rather heavy, deliberate gait, and your thrown weapons travel in specific trajectories. You quickly learn that surviving the later, more crowded stages means anticipating where a scurrying mouse will be rather than throwing at where it currently is.

Where Kitchen War truly tests your patience, however, is in its battle against the physical limitations of the Supervision itself. The handheld was infamous for its cheap, unlit screen, which suffered from terrible motion blur whenever sprites moved quickly. Because the developer opted for backgrounds that sometimes match the tonal shade of the enemies, the fast-moving vermin can occasionally blend into the scenery. It creates an unintended camouflage effect where bugs become blurry, ghosting smudges, forcing you to memorise their patrol routes and rely on raw instinct to avoid taking a cheap hit.

The auditory experience is exactly the sort of frantic, slightly tinny chiptune you would expect from a budget 1992 release. It loops continuously in the background, punctuated by the harsh, static-filled crunches of your crockery connecting with the enemy. Should you manage to fight your way through the gruelling sixth stage, the game unceremoniously dumps you at a short credits screen - a brutally abrupt reward for your hard work. Despite its hardware hurdles, Kitchen War is a fundamentally solid and endearing platformer. It proves that a strange premise and a handful of flying plates were all you really needed to make an engaging time-waster back in the wild west of the retro handheld era.