After a successful Kickstarter campaign and several trips around the indie circuit, Trinket Studios' Battle Chef Brigade will be receiving some help in bringing it to the masses with the help of Adult Swim Games, and the two could not be a better fit. Adding yet another unique notch to the Adult Swim Games belt, Battle Chef Brigade is a mixture of Vanillaware-style action RPGs and Columns-style puzzlers, and what we've been able to sample so far suggest that a mixture like this is shaping up to be one tantalizing dish indeed.

Set in a far-off fantasy land with humans, orc, elves and more living side-by-side, the titular Battle Chef Brigade is a team devoted to both keeping the city safe from monsters and making sure the population gets fed. To do so, they hunt down monsters for the ingredients needed to make delicious meals, which just so happen to sometimes take the form of Iron Chef-style duels where brigadiers challenge each other for practice or the opportunity to rise up in the ranks. All of this is told through four different campaigns featuring some absolutely gorgeous hand-drawn art and monster design, and some well-written dialogue with a hefty dose of charm. So to say that the game has the art of good world-building down is an understatement.

Of course, Battle Chef Brigade also has the stellar gameplay needed to be served alongside that world-building as well. After being given the preferred kinds of ingredients to include and after choosing the type of equipment you want to use, the match begins and you have a few minutes to head out into the wilderness and hunt down whatever monsters will drop the ingredients you need, each having a different combination of multi-colored elements. After filling up your inventory, head back, stock the pantry with your newfound goods, and bring the ingredients with best elemental puzzle pieces you need to drop in your pot's grid, getting them mixed together via a match-three puzzler. And throughout all of this, you opponent is rushing to perfect their dish as well. So the trick is to find a balance between being speedy enough to fight monsters and add ingredients in a limited amount of time, but also making sure to concentrate on what food you need to gather and properly setting up your grid for the best meal. And indeed, both sections control smoothly and fantastic.

The demo I played had me playing as Mina, the human girl, but I noticed later that the orc character, Thrash, used a different system in placing their ingredients into their stew, effectively having a different set of mechanics for the puzzle portion of their game. So with each character having their own unique play style, and with multiplayer elements on the table as well, it looks like Battle Chef Brigade should lend itself fairly well to multiple play sessions. It's such an inspired and unique blend genres that play great together that the odds are even you'll want to spend as much time with the game as possible, but we'll see if that is indeed the case when Battle Chef Brigade comes out in the near future.