KuloNiku: Bowl Up! — Game Overview

By DeadAngelsHell

Posted on July 6, 2025

Indie Overview
KuloNiku: Bowl Up! — Game Overview

KuloNiku: Bowl Up! is the next single-player game from the creators of Knight vs Giant: The Broken Excalibur. You’ve just inherited your grandma’s once-famous meatball restaurant, the Bakuso, in the cozy town of KuloNiku. Now it’s up to you to bring it back to its former glory! Cook and serve ramen until you are able to compete against other restaurants in the ‘Bowl Off’!

You start out with only a few ingredients, but there is a store accessible later with a variety of new ingredients and recipes. The core gameplay is to serve ramen based on customers preferences by doing cooking minigames. Each customer will let you know how they prefer their food, and then you adjust the recipe to fit their tastes. The game truly excels in its flexible ordering system and accessible, easy-to-enjoy minigames. When characters order a custom dish, it gives them more personality, breaking the monotone repetitiveness of making the same dishes each time. The goal is not to fulfill the most amount of orders within a time limit like many other cooking games; instead, your goal is to complete each minigame as best as you can to make the best dish for the customer. This allows you to slow down and appreciate the art style and character traits. The customer will rate the ramen based on how closely it matches their request, giving more money and reputation for a closer match.

As you gain enough reputation, you will be able to enter the ‘Bowl Off.’ During this event you will be tasked to create a dish according to the judges specifications, and you will be graded on how well you perform. If your dish is picked as the winner, your restaurant’s standing will increase, which unlocks more items in the store. The battles are only available during certain days of the week, so pay attention to the days.

Content Image

The art style is very cartoonish and anime-inspired, while the character designs seem to pull more from anime culture. The creators of the game seem to be leaning into anime tropes when creating the characters. One of the first characters introduced in the demo, for example, has their hairstyle like a star and is bashful (also known as a tsundere) when interacting with your character. During these interactions you learn that she used to eat at Bakuso a lot when your grandmother was running it, so she is excited that it is open again. Although she tries to downplay her excitement about Bakuso reopening, she is unsuccessful in doing so. There is another character that you will meet later on in the demo that plays heavily into “weeb culture,” but I won’t talk about this to allow players to discover them on their own.

The Future

KuloNiku: Bowl Up! is scheduled to release sometime during Q3 2025, but there is a demo available on Steam now.