An SRPG roguelike that needs more seasoning.
Monster Menu: The Scavenger’s Cookbook is a game consisting of many attractive ingredients. It’s a roguelike strategy RPG dungeon crawler with anime art style and crafting mechanics. If asked to make a game out of a buzzword that appeals to me, Monster Menu comes close. But it didn’t quite live up to the promise of that winning concept, and was a bit half-baked, so to speak (apologies for the food puns in this review).
Created by Nippon Ichi Software (NIS), makers of games such as the Disgaea series, Monster Menu takes place in a fantasy setting where characters go exploring a dungeon. However, due to poor planning and getting lost, the character is exposed to death’s door at the start of the game with no food or supplies. Eventually, you’ll encounter a dead monster and nibble on its arm, despite the obvious discomfort. The name of the game here is survival with the materials at hand, in this case monster parts.
Immediately after this intro, build the rest of your party using standard fantasy character classes, set up your base camp, and explore auto-generated dungeons. The dungeon consists of floors where you can rest, and the 10th floor has a boss battle. The next floor will start a new biome. Exploration is done in roguelike style. As you move through the floors, fight the enemy for as long as you can, and when you die you’ll return to his first floor with your equipment and start over at level 1. Then start over.
Combat is a grid-based SRPG that forms as you encounter monsters on the map and includes all monsters in your surroundings. This will allow you to strategize before engaging in battle. Because you can determine the number of enemies you fight and sneak up on them to gain the upper hand. If you encounter an enemy from behind and sneak up on you, all party members can move first (although they may do the same to you). Without advantage, turn order is based on speed. The rest of the combat involves turn-based attacks and skills that use position to your advantage. Unusual menus during battle He one of his options is Devour. When you kill an enemy, its body is still in the grid, and if your character chooses the Devour option, it consumes that enemy, regains health, and also gains skills in certain combats. It’s a great idea, but I’ve found myself not using this much, especially since it takes a turn, the health regeneration is marginal, and skills don’t carry over, especially since this consumes items that can be looted from enemies.
The food system doesn’t stop there. The only healing items are food and water, which you can eat and drink in the field for basic boosts if needed. However, in most cases, storing items in rest areas between levels is a better option. There, you can rest to recover at the cost of hunger and thirst meters. The meter also wears out all the time. While camping, you can cook items based on various recipes. This not only reduces hunger and thirst, but also gives you stat boosts and passive skills for the rest of your run. Ingredients also have a freshness meter before they spoil, and since all ingredients are looted from monsters, different foods can actually affect your happiness meter, temporarily reducing your stats. Ultimately, the cooking mechanic becomes an ongoing balancing act trying to make sure every character survives while boosting stats and processing every meter. There is also a simple crafting mechanism that allows you to improve and repair items. The monster menu aims to balance several different meters and stats, ultimately becoming a true act of juggling. If things are going well, you can optimize your character based on your strategy, but if you’re in a difficult situation, just feeding your character might be a struggle.
The presentation is solid. The art style is a cute chibi anime art style that you can customize when you create your character. The music is repetitive but good. The biggest problem with the presentation was the repeated audio. When each floor has a few different points where you can loot monsters or collect items, and there are only a handful of lines to do so, it becomes borderline annoying to the point where characters play the game on mute even if they can’t even hear the “did you mean this?” every time you open a treasure chest. That being said, I like the art style and presentation of some of the more creepy menu items. There is also an option to censor particularly gross items, which is great.
The biggest problem with Monster Menu is how iterative each run is. Maps on each floor may have different layouts, but the enemies are mostly the same. Since you’re running the same character you originally created, you can’t experiment with different classes unless you start a new game. So gameplay always feels the same. I don’t have the fun of trying out different builds that make me love roguelikes. There’s not much you can do to play with the build, but at least you didn’t lose the feeling that you learned something new and figured out how to improve your strategy and gameplay to take you a little further. At the end of the day, it felt like Monster Menu’s progress was only driven by slightly better loot, and not a particularly compelling hook.
Story-wise, there’s little else besides the previously mentioned intro, and the few notes you can pick up about another party aren’t particularly interesting, and certainly not enough to move the player forward. Some games crashed on Switch, which was frustrating. This kind of thing only happened a few times in my time with Monster Menu, so it wasn’t too big of an issue. And this game has an autosave feature. But for a game I already didn’t enjoy very much, it was demoralizing.
Monster Menu: The Scavenger’s Cookbook is frustrating because it feels like there’s a good game here. In fact, NIS has produced so many good RPGs so far that if he decides to do a sequel, I might want to check it out too. I feel like we put in so many systems, meters, and mechanics that we forgot to put in something to keep you playing. There are many better games out there in all the genres this game references, but despite its interesting ideas, Monster Menu fails to come together to deliver a satisfying meal.
