“Beastro is a cozy culinary adventure where the fate of the world rests on what’s for dinner! Farm and gather fresh ingredients, tackle cooking minigames, and create tasty recipes to fuel the Caretakers for deckbuilding battles as they seek to save the world.” – Steam Description

---

---

Beastro really surprised me. I thought it was going to be a run of the mill farming style game. You play as Panko, a sous chef who finds himself a reluctant restaurant owner when his mentor goes missing. The game opens with you finding Flambe, a fire spirit and one of the worlds guardians, injured and hiding in your small town as she recovers from her injuries. The story comes out with a bang, which is refreshing to the palette for the genre. Panko is driven by a desire to find his mentor Travers and the world is overrun with monsters which makes the pacifist denizens of Palo Pori more than a little on edge. With Flambe helping Panko in the restaurant, the meals Panko can cook help infuse “Flavor Magic” into any of the world’s Caretakers that partake.

The game is separated into three main sections every day. In phase one, you have the morning to gather ingredients from the town and from your farm, taking care of your animals and crops. You aren’t timed and you can gather as many or as little as you want. I am a hoarder so I did a pass around the town collecting every shiny and making sure I had a few of every fish type available that day. You can absolutely just collect what you need for that day at the restaurant and go straight into phase 2, aka “the Afternoon”.

In the afternoon, you open the restaurant and select the meals you will be serving to the patrons that day. The mini-games you are tasked with completing are based on the ingredients for the meals which you are serving that day. You are graded on your completion level for each mini-game and get Chef Experience after each one. You need to balance which mini-games you want to complete with the money for the dish or restaurant appeal each dish provides. You do have some influence over which games you play but don’t have a way to forgo them entirely if you don’t like them. Once you have completed the mini-games you are set to run the completed dishes to the appropriate customer. You are graded on how quickly you got the meal to them and it affects the tip you receive. After you serve the patrons, you can talk with the Caretaker that has a reservation with you. This is the character for the rogue-lite run in the next phase. You will assemble their meal meeting any dietary desires they have for maximum stamina (health) and for the strongest cards to be placed in their deck for your upcoming run.

Once you have fed the Caretaker, you can close the restaurant that that triggers phase 3. In Phase 3, or “the Evening”, you have another opportunity to collect ingredients that only spawn at night. There are specific fish at night and specific grubs for night fishing, specific plants, etc. so make sure that you’re looking around! You need to have put the ingredients in your foxy little paw at least once to unlock recipes with the Chef points you’re getting from gathering and the cooking mini-games. Once you have gathered all the ingredients you want to, you report to the Tea House and the caretaker you fed in Phase 2 will regale you of their adventure today.
This is where the rogue-like portion of the game comes in: you select a route to go and there are icons, like a board game or other roguelites you may have played, indicating what will be found at that space. You can see skulls for combat spaces, a leaf for ingredients, and logs and rocks for… well wood and rocks. There are some other special ones, but I’ll let you find those for yourself. The combat is where the game really shines and you can tell it was made to be the focus. The flavor wheel gives an interesting take on the Rock Paper Scissors gameplay with advantages, weaknesses, and ways to influence by balancing and enhancing flavors.

Some of the cards you make from the ingredients you serve can really be a game changer. For example, one of the cards I had would knock the second opponent away if I won against the first opponent. It made the struggle of double combat a cinch. It’s things that change the gameplay that make you really focus on the ingredients so you have the best opportunity in the combat. After you complete or fail your run, the caretaker’s tale will end and Panko can go sleep in his house to do it again the next day.

• Graphics– The graphics are wonderful, I particularly loved the art direction. I want to follow and share whoever did the character design for the game. Oyshi is so distinct, the other flavor caretakers are unique, and the monsters are SO. CUTE. I would play some sort of creature collector spin off of this game with just the little food creatures because I want to pet all of them.
• Gameplay– The gameplay loop was satisfying to me, but I can see how that might not be the case for everyone. I think having a way to automate some of the facets like ingredient gathering, maybe through placing orders for ingredients the night before with your leftover gold (After all, this IS a restaurant, right?) would be a good way to bridge that gap. Like I said, the 3rd phase, the combat, felt like the main focus and it was well thought out. The cooking minigames were a nice change of pace for me, but the boiling one being a free throw seemed like an odd one out stylistically. I would have liked to see more interactivity in some of the ingredient gathering, fishing was just a “Press A!” and everything else was “Press A!” as you ran over, but I’m sure I’m the minority in that regard.
• Sound– The music was chill and relaxing. I didn’t love that it wasn’t completely voice acted but that’s a big budget item to expect. The voice acting in the cutscenes was very good. The cooking sound effects during the mini-games was atmospheric and particularly in the skillet mini-game it was intuitive when burning bubbles were spawning.
• Controls– Controls were good with an XBOX controller on the PC, standard farming sim stuff. A to interact, left stick to move, right stick to look around. As mentioned in the gameplay, your interact button will get a lot of use but I don’t think it’s meant to be a complex control kinda game.
• Story– The story is good, albeit a little formulaic. An event happened that opened these gates letting monsters pour out. Each caretaker has a key for their specific gate to close it so the monsters stop pouring out, but they need Panko and Flambe’s flavor magic infused food in order to be strong enough. You go in a specific order using 1 caretaker to unlock the next, and so on. It’s not a bad thing, cliches exist for a reason, but what really sells it is each character’s personality and development. It might be a simple story but the characters in it are so loveable.

P.S. Did I mention you can pet the animals in your farm?