A Culinary Mash-Up That Really Shouldn’t Work, But Does
There aren’t many games that are as ambitious as Beastro, but you wouldn’t know it from screenshots or videos. This is three games in one, each feeding the other – sometimes literally – and not once do they feel detached or vestigial. If you were to sketch all of the game loops at play in Beastro, you’d be filling a whiteboard. If that makes Beastro sound complicated, then it isn’t – not really. And that’s because it never gives you too much to chew on.
Part of Beastro’s secret is that it’s so colourful, warm and inviting as a game world. You want to delve deeper, because Beastro is situated somewhere between Jim Henson and Hideo Miyazaki. Some of the characters, particularly Panko, Flambe and the first caretaker champion you meet, Oyshi, were made to be immortalised as poseable figurines.
The Origin Story Of Pizza Express
You play Panko, a sous chef who finds that their chef and mentor, Travers, has gone missing. That’s left you in charge, and apparently Travers never took you through initiation. So, you’re learning all of his jobs, just as you cover them for the village.
A day in Palo Pori goes something like this: you start the morning by gathering foodstuffs. There’s a bit of Harvest Moon or Story of Seasons to these opening moments, as your first stop is likely your garden, where you tend your crops and harvest anything ripe, as well as check your animals. You might buy and sell among the markets, as well as stock up on fish. These opening hours of the day are as bucolic as Stardew, and it can be tempting to just exist in this delightful walled village.
Something would be nagging on your conscience, though. Because outside of the walls of the city, there are monsters who are growing increasingly agitated. Caretakers need to cull them, and those noble warriors need feeding, which is very much your position in society. Plus you probably want to uncover what happened to Travers.
A Dip In The Middle Of The Day
This is where you head inside the restaurant, which forms the second third of the day (otherwise known as ‘afternoon’). You are serving food to customers, as well as discovering new recipes. Serving food takes the form of Cooking Mama-style minigames, and I found that they developed to become the more tiresome side of Beastro. While they all have you participating in lively activities that are nothing like the rest of the game, they can also become repetitive. Once you’ve stirred tofu around a pan or played basketball (?) with your foodstuffs ten or twenty times, they can begin to grind.
The ingredients you’ve gathered and prepared are also taken into the recipe preparation. Each item has sweet, sour, salty, bitter, umami or spicy flavours, and the flavour profile you create on a grid is important. Because the meals are fed to Beastro’s caretakers, and the composition of those meals determines what gets added to their deck of cards for a spot of deckbuilding.
This was a bit of a surprise to me. I didn’t expect to pivot from a Harvest Moon to a Slay the Spire. But that jarring feeling soon drops, as you realise that this final third is integrated so well into the rest.
An Unexpected Card Game Appears
The flavours in your caretaker’s meal will determine the cards they get when raiding the forests and swamps outside. While the caretakers are distinct characters, you still get to participate in these match-ups. And they’re beautifully realised, presented as Tearaway-style paper-theatre. The characters bounce up on sticks, animated in a flickbook stylee. It’s a big stylistic swing and it completely hits.
The caretaker approaches nodes on a Spire-style map, and they often result in combat. This is with creatures that are themed around different foods. Beastro is brilliant at taking its flavour wheel – the sours and bitters that we already mentioned – and sprinkling it all over the various aspects of this deckbuilder. The regions you visit are associated with different flavours, and creatures of that flavour are more likely to appear. So, you are anticipating this likelihood with decks and cards that are of the same flavour, or that are complimentary. Even the caretakers have flavour-oriented effects. Flavour infuses everything.
It takes a little time to get used to this side of Beastro, particularly in terms of the flavour wheel and the meals that are needed to overcome tougher bosses and enemies. We hit our head against several sections until we leaned into a particular flavour strategy. But I never switched off in these ‘evening’ sections: I was locked into making the optimal decks and the right plays. It’s often about saving the best cards for the moment that will most amplify them.
If there is a quibble, it’s that I found it difficult to deviate from some of my favourite caretakers, and the later caretakers always seemed to outmode the earlier ones. I love Oyshi, and I deeply want to play him more, but the flavours of the dungeons and his lack of power meant that reversing never felt possible.
A Routine That You Look Forward To Each Day
With the evening done, and the caretaker returning to Palo Pori with yet more ingredients and rewards, the loop is almost complete. You might head home via the stores or fishing holes of the village, but mostly you are ready for the next day, and the next opportunity to get further in Beastro’s evening card games. As you would hope with a game of this type, there is always that pull for just one more day, just one more optimisation.
I absolutely marinated myself in Beastro. I soaked up the life-sim stuff in the village, as well as the card games of the evening. Sure, neither of those aspects are as deep or intricate as a game dedicated to them, but acing one tended to mean that you aced the other, and that’s a winning feeling. The minigames of Beastro’s afternoons couldn’t quite match the rest, but I was forgiving because they were more time-consuming than annoying. Hey mostly acted like a warm-up to the good stuff.
Beastro is three very different courses that combine to make a surprisingly hearty meal. They also look gorgeous too, making a game that I expected to blast through in a day or two, but ended up enjoying for weeks. Magnifique.
Important Links
From Farm To Fight – Beastro Serves Up A Day One Game Pass Feast – https://www.thexboxhub.com/from-farm-to-fight-beastro-serves-up-a-day-one-game-pass-feast/
Download from the Xbox Store, via Game Pass if you like – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/beastro/9njrsc0b0k88
