Kirby's Dream Buffet
Review

Kirby's Dream Buffet (2022) is an outlandish race where the goal is to eat as much cake as you can. You dodge obstacles and bounce on sweets to traverse through a world of candy. This wacky setup is made all the more unusual as you use Kirby's staple transformation ability to gain an advantage over the other players.

You compete against others to eat as many strawberry-and-cream cake decorations as you can, racing down buttercream slopes and across sponge plains. You can use some environmental objects to your advantage, such as gummy eggs, which double as jump pads. As you eat more, your Kirby grows larger, which can impede your progress as you become more cumbersome. At the end of each race, each player is weighed, and the heaviest player (who has eaten the most) wins.

You can use Kirby's famous inhale ability, where he takes on abilities of enemies by inhaling them whole, and also the mouthful mode introduced in Kirby and the Forgotten Land to gain different sweet abilities. This means that even if you're losing, you can always make a comeback, raising the stakes and driving competition.

The result sounds strange on paper but, like Fall Guys, works well to create a competitive yet still lighthearted party game that's lots of fun and pushes you to use the abilities you have in ever more creative ways.

Our examiner, Ben Kendall, first checked Kirby's Dream Buffet 16 months ago. It was re-examined by Jo Robertson and updated 5 months ago.