New Meat

SUMMARY: In New Meat, you play as silent protagonist Niko, the new hire at Burger Site. Like most fast food chains IRL, Burger Site’s burgers are made of monsters from the massive meat dungeon beneath the restaurant, and each day it’s your job to delve in and slay enough to hit your daily meat quota. The quota increases each day until the end of day 5, where the game ends and you get to know whether or not you got hired, fired, and/or worse. GAMEPLAY: (I’m probably not the best at describing gameplay, but I’ll try.) New Meat is a roguelike turn-based RPG. It takes place over a course of five days, and each day after briefly chatting with your coworkers you delve into the meat dungeon to collect meat, which you mainly get from fighting enemies, but can also find in chests, crates, on the floor, etc. You have a meat quota to fulfill that increases each day, and the more meat you collect, the more money you earn to buy stat upgrades with for the next day. The way the game works is that you move forwards from room-to-room, and have a set of enemies that you need to get rid of before moving to the next one. There’s three “segments” to the dungeon (although they look the same visually…

This unassuming little game ended up sucking me in for much longer than I'd expected. It's got fun writing and a quirky, Earthbound-like sense of humor, combined with a very effective game loop that kept me wanting to go for just ONE MORE ROOM long after I knew I needed to quit and do something else. If you like retro JRPGs and/or roguelites, you will get a lot of bang for your buck. My major gripe is that the menus are cumbersome to deal with, requiring multiple repetitive clicks to navigate. (I've never played an RPG Maker game before, so this may simply be a limitation of the game engine.) On a related note, I would like to have seen a "consume immediately" option when buying food items, because the game tells you explicitly it's in your best interest to down those right away at the beginning of a day's run, and it's tedious to have to click through each one to use it. That aside, there's enough interesting progression in the form of items, bosses, NPCs and story points to keep me wanting to go back and play some more. I've got a meat quota to fill, and I don't think I can afford to lose this job. ;)

for the dev: the immersive sim aspect is quite nice, the gameplay right now is hold Z simulator. the overarching strategy is[spoiler] raising your speed and main attack stat so high that you attack before nearly anything and one shot them. this also negates the need for sustain.[/spoiler]

Pretty good, looking forward to more upcoming games from this dev too.

[b]"you ready for another fun-filled adventure keeping our low-margin business model viable"[/b] 💖🫀🖤 🟩 interesting and unique, neat theme, fun variety 🔷 eventually i was just rushing through the rooms trying to get to the bosses 🔴 some clunky jankiness from the engine, some repetitive tedium [b]vibes:[/b] minimum wage grind [b]loops:[/b] enter the basement of a fast food restaurant and go through a meat dungeon fighting meat monsters to get enough meat to meet your quota. there's no leveling, instead you find equipment, items, and use money to buy stat upgrades. [b]ramblings:[/b] i quite like this, it has a really neat idea that it executes well, it has a nice goofy fun feel to it. there is overall a roughness to it though, some of it due to the engine. i liked the music ok enough the first few times i heard it, that didn't last since it gets repetitive real fast. it tries its best to recreate a roguelike experience within its engine limitations, does it fairly decently. with one exception, it relies on item containers, way too much. each room will have multiple, sometimes a dozen or more. i just started ignoring them instead of opening them, simply because i…

Neat and fun little game that manages to make turn-based combat feel fast-paced and exciting. Very replayable with plenty of different loot and gear that makes for different runs. Kinda wish there were more secrets, more interactable stuff, and more areas to explore, but there's still enough here to be satisfying.