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A mixed bag of delights and frustrations | Full Review - Monster Menu: The Scavenger's Cookbook

2K View2023-05-25

Monster Menu (NS, PS4, PS5)

Adventure

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Monster Menu: The Scavenger's Cookbook is a dungeon crawling surviving turn-based RPG with a heavy focus on cooking and monster eating, released for the Nintendo Switch and Playstation

🟩Pros

+Unique monster menu system, eat everything, cook everything!

+A good mix of rogue-like and survival mechanics

+Complete character and party customization

🟥Cons

-Combat can easily get repetitive over time

-Looks outdated visually and from a technical standpoint

-Clunky direct third person controls that feels out of place

The game starts with the player created rookie character in his maiden exploration of what is claimed to be a novice dungeon. However, the character quickly finds himself in a life and death situation, with extreme hunger and dehydration as he is lost in the supposedly novice dungeon. As a last resort, he is forced to eat a part of a dying corpse to survive. Yes, underneath this lighthearted chibi art style, there lies a somewhat gruesome and disgusting premise of monster consumption that permeates throughout the whole game.

After enduring the corpse-eating session, he collapses, and wakes up in a random camp. There, the player is given three more characters to create: Choose from a selection of base appearances, then customize its characteristics, traits, and features. Such as, face, hair, clothing, class, personality, or even voice. You can even create male looking female characters, or vice versa. The players are essentially creating a whole four-man party of their liking.

Then the actual gameplay starts, which centers around progressing in a series of increasingly harder rogue-like dungeons, trying to find the next floor, and all while surviving. By saying survive, you not only need to worry about enemies, but also hunger and dehydration. As the game puts it, you need your calories to survive.

The dungeon crawling involves direct control of characters trying to find the entrance to the next floor, instead of commanding their movements, both during exploration and in combat. All four characters combine into one entity, but they separate during combat when encountering monsters. Monsters roam the levels, and upon contact, the surroundings promptly transform into a grid-like battleground, initiating a turn-based combat format. Approaching them from behind gives you a free first attack, and vice versa.

The whole combat seems rather rudimentary. You can attack monsters, use items, and depending on your class, use different abilities such as AOE attacks. Some attacks are melee, some are fully ranged, and some have specific distances in which they can attack. After a while, it can easily get repetitive, especially with repetitive looking monsters and repetitive use of abilities. The only unique aspect is the “devour” option, which gives the characters the ability to eat (yes, EAT) fallen monsters while in combat, granting them bonuses, or even stat penalties.

Much of the magic that comes in this game comes in the camp system where the party can rest between dungeons. In this system, players have the ability to craft various items, such as arrows or cooking tools. Additionally, the game features the highly intricate "Monster Menu" system, which enables players to prepare dishes using discovered predefined recipes or engage in experimental cooking by combining random ingredients.

This system is a powerful one, and is strongly encouraged for the players to utilize. Apart from providing calories for survival, it can also bestow a range of bonuses to the characters, otherwise unobtainable by other means.

As part of the rogue-like experience. Dying will result in do-overs for everything. Well, almost everything. You still keep some items, such as recipes, equipment, and your hard-earned meta knowledge that you can use to progress further. Depending on your difficulty level, additional items may also be lost. It being a rogue-like really emphasizes the survival aspect of the game, and encourages leveraging the power of cooking even more.

Side-stepping into the visuals department, they appear to be very outdated, even by Nintendo Switch standards. The overall aesthetic resembles something from the PS2 era. Although the cel-shaded graphics for the characters pose no issue, the environments, reminiscent of the PS2 era, are clearly outdated and lack personality. Combine that with the menu system which has a somewhat PS1-like appearance, and the weirdly still lengthy loading times, the game lacks the visual prowess one would expect from a technical standpoint.

The direct controls are also clunky and don’t really fit with the dungeon-crawling turn-based format of the game. Additionally, some camera issues plague the game, with hard to control third person view, and various elements in the world sometimes obstructing the characters' vision.

Conclusion:

Monster Menu: The Scavenger's Cookbook offers a distinctive blend of gameplay mechanics and a unique concept with its Monster Menu system and survival elements. Players who enjoy experimenting with crafting and strategic resource management may find enjoyment in this game. However, those seeking polished visuals, smooth controls, and deep combat may be left wanting.

Mentioned games

Monster Menu (NS, PS4, PS5)

Adventure

Get

A rogue-like survival RPG cooking sim? | First Impressions - Monster Menu: The Scavenger's Cookbook

Monster Menu: The Scavenger's Cookbook is a game that attempts to blend elements of rogue-like dungeon crawling, survival crafting, cooking sim, and turn-based combat mechanics. It features cel-shaded anime chibi art style and a third person view gameplay. Monster Menu starts with the player created rookie character in his maiden exploration of what is claimed to be a novice dungeon. However, the character quickly finds himself in a life and death situation, with extreme hunger and dehydration as he is lost in the supposedly novice dungeon. As a last resort, he is forced to eat a part of a dying corpse to survive. Yes, underneath this lighthearted chibi art style, there lies a somewhat gruesome and disgusting premise of monster consumption that permeates throughout the whole game.

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Serve up monstrous meals in this cooking-themed dungeon crawler - Monster Menu Quick Review

PLAY IT OR SKIP IT? Play it if you’re a fan of dungeon crawlers. Monster Menu revolves around a group of adventurers that find themselves trapped in a mysterious dungeon. After a while, they start to get hungry, and they’re ravenous enough to put anything—even monster meat— on the menu. This isn’t the first culinary roguelike I’ve played, but its cooking mechanics are surprisingly deep, and the mix of survival gameplay and dungeon-crawling is satisfying. It’s heavy on grinding, and it’s unlikely to win over players that aren’t fans of the genre, but I still found it to be pretty fun.

Ndi5K2023-05-23