Hello everyone!

The Sheer Cat team is officially starting the devlogs for Outside the Kitchen, our new 3D psychological thriller whose prototypes we have been testing behind closed doors and whose atmosphere we have been carefully shaping. In this first post we wanted to tell you not just what we're building, but where the idea came from.

From Old Web Games to Psychological Horror

Anyone who got into games early remembers the old browser-game concept of "doing something else without getting caught by your boss or teacher" — slacking off. There's a boring task you're supposed to be doing, but you sneak off to something else and snap back to "looking busy" the moment you hear footsteps approaching.

We took that nostalgic, simple mechanic and set it on a thoroughly dark, claustrophobic survival foundation.

In OTK you are trapped inside a house. While you work out your escape plan, your greatest camouflage is cooking. You have to act natural — as if you were "just making an ordinary dinner" — in front of a menacing mother figure who watches you constantly and waits for the smallest slip. With the stove lit and the kitchen busy, you have to slip into the back rooms, uncover the secrets of the house, and return to your cutting board as if nothing happened the moment danger comes close.

Flipping the Formula

Stealth and thriller games usually share a familiar structure: you start outside and try to sneak into a dangerous, unknown place — an abandoned building, someone else's house — and explore it.

With Outside the Kitchen we turned that formula completely on its head. You are already inside. What's more, you're in the place where you should feel safest, your own home... and your goal is to get out through that door. To escape the threat inside, you have to explore the house and survive in the middle of a game of cat and mouse. We're designing an experience with no supernatural events and no monsters — only realistic psychological pressure and domestic claustrophobia.

Development is going at full speed right now. On the Unity side the team is putting in serious hours to stitch these "cooking and stealth" mechanics together seamlessly.

In the coming devlogs we'll start getting into the technical details of how we're building our antagonist — the mother — and her reactive AI.

See you in the hallways of the house,

The Sheer Cat Team