A game of hide-and-seek with vegetables, and a store page that mentions seizures

The story sells folkloric suspense; the players who finished it complain about the same lopsided ending and achievements that have refused to unlock for years.

Adorable vegetables, a not-so-adorable warning

Cabbage asks the Chompettes out to play hide-and-seek, and the synopsis has your guard down within a line. Two lines further down, that same page warns that the light from the screen can trigger a seizure in players with photosensitive epilepsy, and that the story suits neither children nor anyone who rattles easily. The whole game rests on that contrast: no blood, no sex scenes, no swearing — and yet a warning of the sort usually reserved for heavy horror.

Eastern European folklore sits inside packaging that gives no hint of where it is heading. Finding all five Chompettes leads to one of six possible endings, and the dialogue shifts from round to round, so playing hide-and-seek again is not watching the same scene again. The whole thing fits into forty minutes — longer, if you mean to unpick the mystery completely — and it throws in a real cooking recipe, credited to Natasha's Kitchen, to make once the game is switched off. Secrets are tucked around the environment, and the page has its own advice about them: handle them carefully.

A studio wall with almost nothing but discounts on it

This demo went up on October 6, 2020. The studio's wall is almost all sales talk — all but one post, which marks five years since the full release of Cooking Companions, the game this demo would end up preceding. There, Deer Dream Studios drops the salesman's voice: it was the team's first game, and nobody had expected the volume of theories, fan drawings, people dressing up as the characters and streams that the audience built around it. The post gives players the credit for picking up a piece of Ukrainian history along the way, and it names the figure the plot draws on: Baba Yaga, the folklore character the team says it brought back.

The series outgrew that demo. The full game is set in the Tatra mountains and has a sequel, called Dread Weight. Versions for Switch, PlayStation and Xbox followed, with help from Serenity Forge, along with translations into Spanish, Chinese in two variants, Japanese, Korean and Brazilian Portuguese. Anyone who has followed the game since launch will recognize how unusual that kind of account is on the wall: the rest of the studio's posts are discounts, not behind-the-scenes.

5-to-10-minute sessions, and a cat angling for a scratch

The players who like it write briefly and show more than they tell. One write-up from May 2026 lays out the short-session formula: chopping, cooking and plating dishes in simple minigames that take no time to pick up. Sessions run 5 to 10 minutes — the kind of break you steal without feeling guilty about coming back later. Whoever wrote that had 4 hours on the clock already, and puts the easy mood that holds it all up down to the art of the anthropomorphic vegetables: colorful, good-natured companions in the kitchen.

Another player, at 9 hours in June 2026, narrowed the praise down to the detail that stood out most: a cat turns up on screen and you can pet it. It is a small thing to single out, but it gives away the tone — not one of the players who speak well of the game brings up the mystery or the folklore; what sticks is the comfort of the everyday, not the plot. And the longest write-up, the same one that praised the minigames, is also the one that marks where that comfort stops: the recipe catalog is short, the restaurant grows slowly, and playing alongside someone else is not an option.

A jump scare in the wrong key, an achievement that never unlocks

The complaint that comes up most is not about difficulty: it is about a promise broken twice, and the first break is one of tone. You go in for a mountain mystery and come out feeling you watched the trailer for some other game. One account from October 2020 found the scares predictable and misplaced — more baffling than frightening, the same stinger sound recycled scene after scene. A player in March 2021 called the result half-and-half: the game set out to be cute, funny and terrifying all at once, and settled none of the three. In January 2021 the impression on record was of kids trying to spook a friend, a homemade mood that tips into horror with no explanation. And a Brazilian write-up from May 2024 sums up the fallout: just as the mystery looks about to surface, the scenery changes the subject, the ending lands oddly, and any appetite for the other five endings does not survive it.

The second break is technical, and it holds regardless of how you feel about the tone. A report from May 2023 says that no achievement unlocks at all; another, from August of the same year, confirms the same fault, and the studio has announced no fix. A player who came back much later, in December 2025, still found the list frozen — and one entry on it, playing the demo 5 times, demands such a particular run of choices that it hardly matches the achievement its name promises. The critics go after the plot and the achievement list: nobody, not even the angriest of them, has a bad word for the cooking.

Who closes the game happy, and who walks away empty-handed

Install it if what you want is a cooking break with amiable vegetables and you can live with horror that was promised and never really lands: on Steam, where the game collects scores as well, that audience comes across as broadly satisfied, even while it says little about the plot. Skip it if you came to solve a riddle and close a chapter — anyone chasing that walks away tugging at the same loose threads as the players of 2020 and the players of 2024. And it is not a game to open in front of someone with photosensitive epilepsy, or to leave running with children on their own: the page says so on the opening screen, and the warning is not there for decoration. Achievement hunters walk away empty-handed too — the same block turns up in reports years apart, and the studio has announced no repair.