Beastro

A fresh take on a cozy game. Gather ingredients and take care of your small farm. Prepare meals for the townies, cook up a special dish for your hero and send them on an adventure. Based on the flavour profile of the dish, you build a card deck to use in a turn based combat. While the town area you get to explore, garden, fish and gather ingredients is rather small, you will soon begin to favour higher value ingredients, opting out of running the same collecting route every day. The game is well paced, hitting a sweet spot with its run time before it becomes boring. I thoroughly enjoyed the combat and the story even if it landed on the simpler side.

I bought this game instantly, because I'm a furry who loves cozy games, and have been wanting a furry cozy game that I actually can play without struggling too much and relax with, and THIS game delivers that for me! I love it so much! From the characters, to the art style, to the gameplay! Gosh I LOVE the turn based battle gameplay so much! The fact that it's based on food tastes etc in a game about being a chef is litterally purrfect!^W^

This game oozes lots of charm but ultimately is a slog to play through during the "daytime" cycle of gathering items/tending crops/cooking. It really is unfortunate because the actual "battling" is engaging, though the day cycle is just too boring and repetitive. Also the balance doesn't really make sense because I'm faced with bosses that are weak to an element that I do not have yet for some reason, and sounds like I'm forced to fail until a certain new character comes which has the exact element? This has happened basically twice so far and stopped me from playing. Hopefully one day they make some QOL improvements or speed up the day cycle to auto gather/cook and such because until then there's other better games to play.

I don’t normally write reviews, but I felt it was important to share how much I enjoyed this game. Initially, I picked it up as I thought the art style was nice, and I was looking for a more cozy game to play. I was blown away by how much I liked it, so much so that I decided that I wanted to get all the achievements in the game, which is something I seldom do, especially if I find getting them tedious. It combined some of my favorite things, rougelites and card games, through a very unique system of combining ingredients in an inventory-style puzzle to assemble your decks while balancing out the flavors for more particular caretakers as well as the regions you will be exploring. Having a bit of Stardew Valley vibe as you tend to your crops, caring for the animals, fishing, collecting all sorts of things around town, and upgrading your equipment before transitioning into a restaurant phase. I do wish it provided a little more information on certain recipes, and that the cooking mini-games were more advanced, as they felt random at times. It would also have been fun to include some of the new versions of cooking mini-games used when learning to work with new ingredients. It i…

I liked this game. The art style and worldbuilding is interesting, and the turn based gameplay is fun (I mean it's a deckbuilder, they're addicting!) The problem is that's...the only highlight of this game. The rest of the game is all cozy game stuff, in the form of everyday chores, and item collection. But unlike titles like Stardew or Animal Crossing, it lacks a fundamental aspect of both of these games: charming NPCs. Every piece of dialogue outside the main story is the blandest of bland one-liners, even from the main characters. This makes the setting feel less like a town and more of an RPG hub, where NPCs are just there to give you services rather than have any actual substance to their characters. Which does Not work for a game where you spend the majority of your time *in town*, collecting items from around the map. It ends up making the non-battle sections feel like unnecessary bloat, when all you're doing in these sections is, essentially, grinding for the actual fun part of the game. It's like if you took Slay the Spire, and put in a bunch of unskippable minigames and a cutscene before every run. And there aren't any charming character interactions to distract …

Beastro is a beautiful (if somewhat short) three-in-one game: One is a simple life-sim in which you talk to people, and do some basic farming and caring for animals. Two is a collection of cooking-themed minigames. And three is like a deckbuilding roguelite. The deck for the last part depends mostly on what you feed the adventurer when they visit your restaurant. What you can cook and feed them depends on the ingredients you gather both in the life-sim part and the adventuring part, so these are all interconnected. Each part is pretty well-done and there's a good enough connection that it feels like they all belong together. It took me 15 hours to finish the campaign. Long enough to make it feel worth the price to me, and short enough that some of the more repetitive parts didn't get to feel annoying. I'd wish for some kind of endless-mode though, or some more variance in the campaign. As of now it sadly feels like a one-and-done kind of game for me. With the campaign finished it's over, and I don't really feel enough of a pull to start over again.