"Cook-the-deck charm let down by shallow fights and save-wiping bugs"
About
Beastro is a cozy RPG where cooking dinner decides the fate of the world. You play a cook who farms and gathers ingredients across towns like Palo Pori and Mashland, works through cooking minigames, and assembles meals for the Caretakers, wandering heroes who then head off to fight. Each day splits into morning, evening, and night phases that gate your gathering and prep. The meals you cook translate into a card deck built around flavor and elemental attributes, and the Caretakers use it in roguelite deckbuilding battles staged as a paper-puppet theater, where wounded characters get visibly crumpled. It's a single-player story with a defined ending rather than an endless run.
Verdict
Beastro has one genuinely fresh idea, turning what you cook into the deck your heroes fight with, and it wraps that in a paper-puppet aesthetic nobody else is doing. For the first several hours it holds together, the recipe-into-deck planning is satisfying and the world charms. Then the seams show: battles reduce to hunting weaknesses, the gathering chores overstay, and the story stops without warning. Worse, the endgame can lock or wipe your save, which is the kind of flaw that sours a fondly-remembered run. Worth it for the concept and the look, as long as you go in knowing the depth runs out before the goodwill does.
You'll like it if …
- +You want a cozy game where meal-planning feeds directly into a deck
- +Novel art direction matters more to you than tactical depth in battles
- +You're happy with a short, self-contained story and don't need endless runs
You'll dislike it if …
- −You want combat with real decisions rather than matching weaknesses
- −Repetitive fetch-and-gather chores wear you down quickly
- −A single autosave and progress-eating endgame bugs are dealbreakers
Breakdown
- +The loop of gathering, cooking minigames, and building a deck out of the meal keeps the day-to-day varied
- +Arranging ingredients to match a Caretaker's whims and hand them a strong deck is a satisfying puzzle in itself
- −Running around town for ingredients drags: long enough to annoy, not long enough to skip
- −Combat collapses into discarding until you hit the enemy's weakness, with little real decision-making
- +The link between recipe choices and deck construction gives the first hours real strategic pull
- +More systems surface than the cozy framing suggests
- −Your deck locks once an adventure starts, so battles offer no in-the-moment tactical room
- −The story ends abruptly with no post-game or continuation, and replay value thins out fast
- +The food-built world and its worldbuilding are inventive and clearly thought through
- +The puppet-theater framing of Caretaker adventures gives the storytelling a distinct shape
- −Character development stays shallow and several arcs feel unfinished
- −For a game about flavor, plenty of the dialogue reads flat and exposition-heavy
- +The art direction and character design are consistently charming
- +The paper-puppet battle style, down to crumpling low-HP characters, is genuinely fresh
- −Crashes, single-digit-into-teens frame rates, and integrated-GPU failures wreck the opening for some players
- −Resolution settings that refuse to apply leave people stuck at native res with black bars
- +Tutorials are clear and mostly stay out of the way, easing you into the systems
- −One autosave slot and no manual save, so a bad state is hard to escape
- −Beating the final quest can lock you out of your save, and New Game+ has lost player progress
- −The town layout is confusing enough to slow down the gathering you already do too much of
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