This horror sim is like running a food truck in Fallout: cook questionable meals for mutants, monsters, and the occasional alien

The world has ended. Civilization has fallen. The country is an irradiated hellscape. But that doesn’t mean all those shambling mutations miserably wandering the wasteland don’t need something to eat.

If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to have a job in the world of Fallout, Wasteland Bites might be just what you’re looking for. It’s a post-apocalyptic food truck simulator where you’re a short order cook feeding hungry mouths—even if some of those mouths have jagged, bloodstained teeth. There’s a demo available on Steam, and the full game is due out in April.

Welcome to your food truck! It’s stocked with the essentials: raw meat, canned goods, a few unhealthy-looking piles of vegetables, cigarettes, huge rats, a shotgun, rabid dogs… OK, in a normal food truck you wouldn’t expect to find a few of those things, but these are the End Times. You have to adapt.

Honk the horn of your truck to scare the pack of dogs away, nudge the rats off your meat mounds and veggie piles (no need to kill them, they’ll just keep coming back), and keep that shotgun on the counter: you should never judge someone on their appearance, but there’s a line forming outside and some of your hungry customers are pretty hideous.

The mutants and monsters who arrive will place an order, and despite the fact that they’re rotting ghouls with missing limbs (sometimes, missing heads), they’re pretty impatient, wandering off if you don’t serve them quickly. Meals can consist of just about anything in your truck: one raw egg and clove of garlic on a stick, for instance, doesn’t that sound delicious? A sandwich consisting of turnip and potato you shoved briefly into a toaster, yum. Hey, I just cook ’em. The customer is always right, as far as I’m concerned.

Like Fallout, most of these mutants are just normal folk trying to get by in a world gone wrong, but there are some true horrors that will show up at your food truck hoping to make a meal out of you. As I was serving my impatient line of ghouls and mutants, it was hard not to notice a weird glowing apparition slowly sidling up to the truck… until it finally lunged at me.

Another time a poltergeist suddenly appeared in my kitchen, slammed the food service window shut, flipped all my fuses off, and then began shaking the entire truck while grinning into my face.I’ve even seen an alien spaceship hovering over the desert in the distance… until it suddenly swooped in for a much closer look at me.

There are ways to deal with these lethal nuisances: sometimes just aiming a flashlight at them will scare them off, while other times you may need to shut off all the lights, as scary as that sounds. Sometimes simply looking away from the horror will cause them to lose interest. One warning: if you turn and find a gross clown leering back at you, you may have to perform the unpleasant task of honking its nose. Sorry, but this is the wasteland. You will occasionally have to please a dirty clown.

I’m happy to see more weird cooking simulators being served up these days: Omelet You Cook just left early access, Creature Kitchen came out last week, and Wasteland Bites is due out in April, with a free demo out now on Steam.