Kinny and the Cosmic Cauldron Review — Everything Soup

What would you do if you found yourself in a cosmic kitchen, cooking for incomprehensible beings with nothing but a great big cauldron to do so? Is your answer, “I would drop hundreds of goblins into the pot and watch as they bump and grind on each other to the satisfaction of my guest?” If not, you chose wrong.

Kinny and the Cosmic Cauldron is what I can only describe as a Plinko roguelike. The gameplay loop revolves around you meeting increasingly heavy score quotas by dropping differently themed balls into a pot. As each ball bounces off the others, you score a point, with the different balls scoring extra points based on their themes and what they collide with. Each level is a series of four customers, with each one giving you three chances to meet their combined total of points; otherwise, you’re on the menu instead.

The game is simple. Like, incredibly simple. There are no deeper mechanics beyond choosing the right option from your procedurally selected rewards, and what little bits of story you’re presented with are short, sweet, and to the point, mainly just serving as little pieces of filler to tide you over between the ball dropping.

Simple though it may be, the game is incredibly clever with the depth of combinations and synergies in the various balls you find. The builds I ended up making in Kinny and the Cosmic Cauldron felt more synergized and impactful in combination than my builds in some other, more action-oriented roguelikes. You really feel like you made the correct decision when your combination fruit-monkey-sushi build racks up points in the hundreds of thousands.

The sheer depth of Kinny and the Cosmic Cauldron’s builds can be something of a double-edged sword. As you progress through the game, each failed run will unlock more balls to discover in future expeditions, which can further increase the already abundant build synergy you discover dish-to-dish. It also drastically increases the size of the loot pool, making it all the more difficult to find the right balls to make the build you’re using work. While the genre is, of course, about making the best of what you can find, it feels sort of punishing when the more time you invest into the game means the harder it is to wrangle together exactly what you’re going for.

While there is depth to Kinny and the Cosmic Cauldron’s gameplay, that’s sort of the only area that has more than a surface-level serving. The game’s story, as I alluded to earlier, is essentially nonexistent, with nearly every character interaction simply being a throwaway joke with no real meaning or connection to our main character or the setting. While not every game needs to have a story attached to it, I’ll admit that I was a little bit disappointed that we didn’t get any expansion on the characters in Kinny and the Cosmic Cauldron, because they’re all incredible. The “enemy” designs are great references, sure, but the main cast, including the protagonist, are all really cool-looking, and I found myself wanting to know more than just their implied personalities.

This is due in no small part to the game’s incredible artwork, which I think really made the experience for me. The gameplay is fun, sure, but Kinny and the Cosmic Cauldron simply would not be the same if it weren’t lovingly depicted with gorgeous pixel artwork in a very unique style that can only be described as its own. Again, the characters and setting are delightfully wacky and wonderfully designed, so it’s sort of a shame that we didn’t get to delve into them a bit more.

I enjoyed Kinny and the Cosmic Cauldron, but I think the best way for you to enjoy it as well would be in short bursts. When played when you need to kill twenty minutes to an hour, Kinny and the Cosmic Cauldron really shines through, with gameplay that is just deep enough to be engaging without requiring a whole lot of thinking or interaction. Longer play sessions, however, can easily get repetitive, especially as a game over simply gives you a black screen and a restart button: there’s very little to manually unlock, most of the gameplay is just watching as the balls drop, and again, next to nothing in the way of story or character progression. The game is fun, but it is a really hands-off experience, and it doesn’t do much to mix up the formula, so playing for a short while and taking a break is likely the way you’ll enjoy it best.

Kinny and the Cosmic Cauldron is a great game to shut your brain off with, providing you with some fun gameplay that rewards careful planning but doesn’t require a deft mind for strategy or a lot of player input or split-second thinking. The art is gorgeous, the character designs are fun, and the gameplay is delightfully addicting in the simplest of ways. While option bloat can slow down the fun a bit and the game lacks any real story or deeper character exploration, it is nevertheless still a great, fun little game that I highly recommend checking out, well worth the price of entry.

Kinny and the Cosmic Cauldron was reviewed on the PC. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on our Game Reviews page! Kinny and the Cosmic Cauldron is available on Steam.