Welcome back to Save State, where we have to acknowledge that Foodfight! wasn’t a very good movie. A movie about a supermarket, where all of the food comes alive at night? Interesting premise, but the execution was overtly flawed. Now, what if we take the idea of food coming to life at night, and mix it with Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out? Well, you’d get Leftovers KO!, a game that I’ve recently been playing on my Nintendo Switch 2. It’s also available for the PC through Steam.

Leftovers KO! is a very interesting title primarily due to its visuals, which are entirely hand drawn and animated. While there isn’t much of a story to speak of, having to beat the sense out of artichokes and old pizza is novel when it’s done in a 90s Nickelodeon kind of art style. In Leftovers KO!, you receive a call from a scared neighbor as she cryptically tries to explain that you have to box your old food to survive the night, and you’ll use the available moves in your kit to overcome the moldy menaces from your fridge.

Gameplay in Leftovers KO! is quite simple due to its simple control scheme. Pressing the attack button results in a basic punch while pressing up and attack yields a straight jab to the face of your opponent. You can dodge attacks by swaying to the side, which allows you to avoid damage without consuming stamina, while you can block by pressing down on the d-pad which works great for defending against multi-hit attacks. You do seem to take a little bit of damage when blocking as opposed to dodging, but there are some attacks where blocking is just significantly easier to do.

You’ll unlock new moves as you progress through Leftovers KO! as well, like a counter punch and uppercut, which use a lot of stamina but can really put the hurt on your inedible aggressors when used at the right times. Using these moves when needed, like performing an uppercut when the moldy maki roll bends over to grab you, can yield star power to help you put the maki roll in the trash. Similar to Punch-Out!!, you can earn stars by performing well-timed attacks that are dependent on who you’re fighting and then can use those stars to fuel knockout punches. You’ll want to save your star punches for when your opponents go for one of their big attacks or for when you’ve stunned them because these powerful punches will deal significant extra damage then, sometimes ending the fight outright.

Leftovers KO! features a stamina meter that’s separate from your usual health bar that drains as you attack, disincentivizing you from just throwing attacks out willy-nilly. Run out of stamina and you’ll struggle to attack when you need to. Getting hit by your opponent also saps your stamina, though, which can put you into a position where you need to dodge constantly to let your stamina refill slowly. This is certainly a mechanic that the developer put in here to ramp up the difficulty, but it can be exhilarating to come out of the other side of your stamina bottoming out into a win because you were able to dodge four to five attacks in a row successfully.

The sound design in Leftovers KO! is passable. The music is high tempo, high energy which makes complete sense since this is all about punching old food into submission. A lot of the monsters you’re fighting have sound cues as they’re attacking or just after they’ve attacked, which means that a lot of the audio cues you can use aren’t beneficial. However, that’s not really that big a deal as most of the creatures you punch will have some pretty obvious windups you can recognize how to deal with in the third boss fight and beyond. That said, the visual design of this title is glorious, with a very “Aaahh!!! Real Monsters” art style that flows impressively well in motion.

Leftovers KO! is much more challenging than Punch-Out!! Right out of the gate, the first burger you fight is simple enough to take down on your first try by simply reading visual cues, but the second boss, a head of cabbage, might take a couple tries before you reliably knock it out. The good news is the bosses after these two tend to be a little bit on the easier side, with more obvious tells a good portion of the time, but it still warrants mention that Leftovers KO! has a frontloaded difficulty curve. The load times are also on the slow side even on a Switch 2 (12-15 seconds), so if you struggle with some of the early bosses you might become real intimate with the loading screen. That gives you more incentive to not lose, for sure, but it would have been nice if the title included a “Retry” option in the menu.

There are just a scant eight boss fights in Leftovers KO!, and a complete run of it will probably take you around 20 minutes from start to finish. Given the tremendous amount of effort that went into animating all of the characters and backgrounds in this game as a solo developer, that sounds about right for the entry fee of $10. If you wind up struggling against any bosses, you’ll definitely take longer than 20 minutes, but you probably shouldn’t expect to get more than 2-3 hours out of Leftovers KO! from start to finish unless you really, really like replaying Punch-Out!! style titles.

That being said, I think we can bring this entry of Save State to a close. I hope you have a grape day, everyone, and please lettuce know if you need anything. Remember to (maki) roll with the punches!

I’m sorry. See you in two weeks!