Your snacks are trying to kill you in Leftovers KO!, aka Punch-Out for foodies

I can’t be the only person here who’s ever had a fistfight with their washing-up. I have this big metal spatula that has a malicious habit of bouncing out of the drying rack. Again and again, it sneaks under my elbow to spring and sproing over the lino, gathering as much stray onion peel as it can on the way to the door. The fourth time this happened I bent it in two. Then I thought my sieve was giving me stinkeye, so I threw it down and stamped on it, gangland-style. Look, it was kind of a bad day. But one thing I will swear to you, probably-concerned reader: I would never behave this way towards my leftovers.

Any food I don’t finish is placed in fresh Tupperware, carefully dated in black marker, and slotted into the fridge like a holy relic. Sometimes, I open the fridge just to behold my works. In this regard, I am unlike the burned-out white collar protagonist of Leftovers KO!, who opens his fridge one evening to find a hamburger that has gotten so mad at being mouldy it wants to beat his face in.

The hamburger is just the start of your troubles. There’s a positively Satanic slice of stale pizza in the living room, a manky, musclebound… artichoke? I think? in the pantry, and a rabid stick of celery in the bedroom. In the absence of a compost bin, all these putrid hand-drawn foodstuffs must be pummelled into submission, using a combat system inspired by Nintendo Entertainment System classic Punch-Out.

You will dodge, block, punch and haymaker while trying not to run out of stamina. I found the demo quite tricky: you’ll need to KO each oozing comestible several times, and they’ll come back harder every time they clamber to their feet. Along the way, you’ll learn new moves to master in the training room. There’s support for keyboard or controller inputs and I’m equally terrible with both.

It’s all the work of Mountain Man Animation, with Feardemic publishing. Find the demo on Steam. The full game launches on 25th May which, coincidentally, is when I’m doing my next grocery run. Again, though, I must protest that I would never assault my own cooking, though many would consider my cooking an assault.