Experiencing An AYCE Adventure: A Monster Menu: The Scavenger's Cookbook Review

By Manuel

Players: 1
Platforms: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5

Monster Menu: The Scavenger's Cookbook is a new SRPG from NIS that sees you tackling a dungeon, while also eating every monster you can find. An RPG centered on eating monsters might sound a bit reminiscent of Monster Hunter, but first impressions can be deceiving. While NIS never used the term "roguelike" in their marketing, it's clear from even the earliest trailers that that's what this is. So, is this all-you-can-eat roguelike SRPG something you'll want to sink your teeth into? Let's dive into the dungeon and find out!

Monster Menu opens with a random adventurer walking into a dungeon that is supposed to be meant for rookies. They quickly find themselves too tired and thirsty to continue and decide that they're going to have to consume the monster they just killed to survive. After this meal, and after diving back into the dungeon, they are quickly wiped out by the very next monster they see and are rescued by other adventurers from the same adventuring company they belong to. These characters, up to four if you choose to make things easier on yourself, are the ones that make up the party for the game. Each character is customizable, but are all locked into eight main character archetypes, four male and four female. After choosing what they look and sound like, you then settle upon a class like Archer, Berserker, Mage, Warrior, and more. Your only goal from here is to find your way back to the surface world, hopefully in one piece and with a full belly.

Yum! Just like momma used to make!

Meet my all-female party.

If you're looking for more story than that to go with your roguelike, you're going to want to grab a burger somewhere else. Monster Menu has the thinnest of plots, and never really moves beyond simply escaping the current dungeon floor you're on. You are technically given new bits of story by way of logs and journals, but these brief text-only segments pretty much come out of nowhere, explain nothing, and pretty much only exist to bookend boss fights. I want to say that it feels that the developers just tacked on a story at the last minute, but there would have to be an actual story here first for me to make that statement. Me trying in vain to explain just how much Monster Menu lacks a narrative is probably more story than what you'll get by actually playing. One could argue that story isn't important in roguelikes but recent genre entries in the genre, such as Hades for example, manage the balance really well. More than any other part of the game, the lack of anything beyond white text on a black background (which is literally how the aforementioned log entries are displayed), make this game feel almost unfinished.

Speaking of unfinished, I was halfway through the game when I accidentally figured out how to learn skills. I don't want to get too ahead of this review, but the game really just expects you to suss out most of its deeper mechanics on your own. I'm not kidding when I say that the game just drops you into the thick of it, learning skills is only one of many things the game doesn't outline for you. I never quite figured out what I'm supposed to do with my inventory outside of camp, how to keep food from becoming less fresh or spoiled, or any other number of seemingly important, but equally esoteric, gameplay elements. Even cooking, which is core to the game in every way, is left an unexplained mess with only the faintest of tutorial screens to basically show you what to click to make food and nothing else. We'll cover it more in a bit, but I wasted my entire first couple runs of the dungeon on pure trial and error. I'd be lying if I said I actually figured everything out gameplay-wise, even after hours and hours of trying, and this was something I was never quite able to come to terms with.

Hello friends!

If only all the areas looked as nice.

Monster Menu has a very simple gameplay loop. You start at base camp where you can prep your party's equipment, dump unnecessary inventory items, and cook meals or craft items. You then move into a dungeon where you harvest materials like wood and stone from pre-generated spots, collect treasure, and defeat monsters. Following combat you then harvest the bodies of fallen monsters for various edible parts that you can either consume on field or save for cooking back at camp. After you've had your fill of gathering up anything you need it's be time to move onto the next floor and repeat the process. Before heading to the next floor though you might want to set up a temporary camp to do basically the same things you did at base camp, with the added option to rest to both recover HP and to move the in-game clock to a desired time. After ten floors in any particular area you come to a floor with a boss encounter, and you then move to a new section of the dungeon if you're able to defeat them. Oh, and you also score special one-of-a-kind loot from these boss encounters too.

Most every run will start with The Ruins, and I have a bit to talk about regarding that area before we move on. This is by no means a tutorial section, as the game really just goes hard from the get-go, but it definitely has the most by-the-numbers look and feel out of all the dungeons areas. Everything about these first ten floors felt like a chore, especially since you spend pretty much this entire first section fighting against the game itself as you try to learn how actually PLAY the game. It's the most forgettable area, with the worst monsters, the worst music, and I almost wanted to stop playing more than once until I finally cleared the area for good. Thankfully you technically never have to go back to it once you beat the area's boss, but it just adds to the overall bad first impression this game has.

Occasionally you get absolutely mobbed by monsters.

Hopefully you're able to harvest / forage quickly.

Now let's talk combat since you'll be doing quite a bit of it. I find it odd that NIS seems so dead set on referring to this game as an SRPG as there is very little of that here. In effect it plays a lot like another NIS title Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure in that you have a very small party to deal with, and don't fight so much with strategy as much as you simply have the ability to move characters around the battlefield yourself. All monsters are visible on-screen so you can avoid them, surprise them, or get surprised by them, as you see fit. If any other nearby monsters are aware of your presence when combat is initiated they will be drawn into battle too. From here you attack, defend, use skills or items, and are even able to eat fallen enemies. This last until one side completely wipes out the other. You're given experience and can then harvest the body, hopefully without another nearby enemy moving in for the attack while you're distracted. Monsters respawn a few times too so there is something akin to grinding if that's what you enjoy, and you can alter the monsters' spawn rates, levels, and stats via shrines. It's a surprisingly simple combat system, but not at all bad. It's fast moving, and there definitely can be some depth to it if you're able to grasp some of the game's more advanced mechanics. The only real gripe comes that you occasionally land on some floors that are very tiny and absolutely FULL of monsters, leading to quick battle after quick batter until you wipe out enough enemies that they stop respawning.

Besides HP each character also has hunger, hydration, and happiness to worry about. Hunger and hydration are expended by fighting, using skills/spells/etc. and all the meters come into play while camping and cooking. You literally have to eat to survive, as your HP will start to drop if your hunger and hydration go too low. Furthermore, some meals are better suited at raising one thing versus the other, and some pretty much only have a noteworthy effect on one stat. If you choose to eat a "bad" meal, something very spicy or maybe made out of weird ingredients like eyeballs or bugs, your happiness could drop. Outside of altering these meters, your actual core stats like strength, defense, etc. are all also augmented by meals. They can be raised and lowered depending on what it is you’re eating, and certain limited bonuses like "Attack Up", "Faster Foraging", "Water Conservation", and more come with each meal too. Meals can either be assembled from a cookbook, or can be made manually, but all cooked food must be eaten at camp and can't be taken into dungeons. Cooking outside of the cookbook isn't like Breath of The Wild's cooking system where you can just toss anything into a pot and see what you get, here you can only actually cook something that will turn into something edible. If you attempt to cook something that the game hasn't determined will make an actual "meal", you're not allowed to cook it and have to adjust your ingredient. What this means is that things aren't exactly as random as it seems at first, and you're pretty much never going to stray from simply making the best stat-raising meals over and over.

Shrines take points gained from defeating enemies.

A standard results screen after a run.

Since this is a roguelike it goes without saying that you lose all your levels, and level-acquired bonuses, if you die or leave the dungeon. You do get to keep your inventory and your stat gains that come from battle bonuses, shrines, and meals. Alternately, you lose points in most stats if you return to base camp by having your party wiped out. You're only given the option to leave the dungeon after completing a floor, and can only save your game from camp, so it's best to plan ahead for what you hope to accomplish on each run. The slight problem with this system arises from how stat gains can leave some characters greatly overpowered when compared to others. I found that no matter what I did my Berserker, who was in the last spot in the party, never was able to keep up with the other three characters in my party stat-wise. I had to feed her several meals at each camp session just to try to stay ahead of the losing battle. Also, since each floor is randomly generated, some floors barely offer much loot and food to work with in the first place. Overall it's all fairly standard roguelike gameplay, but Monster Menu goes far heavier on permanently raising stats and acquiring skills, as opposed to simply acquiring better equipment on subsequent runs.

"Thish ish sho good!"

Not every meal has a good reaction.

Before I talk graphics I have to mention that I played this game on the Nintendo Switch in Handheld Mode. Basically the least optimal way to play any game, and you can see the results in the screenshots I use throughout this review. Rough edges aside, the game is pretty cute and charming overall. I never once regretted going with the all-female party, and some of the customization options you find in-game kept me going through some otherwise frustrating sections. Unfortunately the same can't be said for the dungeon and monster designs. Most barely go beyond generic, and the few that do are rarely seen; such as boss monsters. Inventory portraits, the meals themselves, and even the animations of eating are all equally uninspired. I actually found it somewhat impressive by how visually boring some of the dungeons could be, most especially The Ruins. Generally speaking, Monster Menu has a great art style, and it really shines in parts, but it's a fairly uneven experience visually as well.

It's time to talk music. I don't want to pick on The Ruins again, but its music made me think that the game was going to go down the subpar sound road. That assumption was thrown out the window once I got into a battle, and heard the first of several awesome themes. Things only got better when I hit the first boss. In short, pretty much everything after The Ruins is absolute fire. Music is really the game's strongest point, and I wish everything about Monster Menu felt as polished. Elsewhere sound-wise, the game is voiced in English and I'm not sure if this should be taken as a positive or a negative. Some of the quips your party makes as they fight and eat can be amusing the first couple times you hear them, but these frequently repeated bits get gratingly annoying fast. I guess you could turn off the voices and just hear that awesome music though, but that doesn't help with the general repetitiveness of the gameplay itself. While definitely my favorite part of the game, sound still somehow left me wishing it could've been just a little bit better.

You spend a lot of time on a screen like this.

Really though, I love my party.

There's not much to say when it comes to controls except that Monster Menu has one of the worst in-game cameras this side of the N64 era. No angle seemed to properly capture gameplay most of the time, and characters and monsters were frequently blocked from view by the environment. One could argue that this is probably intentional, but it really doesn't come off feeling that way when actually playing. Controls come into play as you are able to rotate this wonky in a few different ways, but it never seems to work quite the way you want it to. Also, since the battle goes for the SRPG-lite thing, every character is placed onto a grid for combat. Movement within this grid is very finicky and several times I found myself unable to end my turn as the character I was controlling had stopped a bit too much in the space of another. This could've been easily fixed if each character's movement was actually properly locked to the grid spaces, but we get surprisingly clunky movement instead. It's nothing to complain too strongly about, but it adds to everything already wrong with the Monster Menu's presentation.

Replayability is where roguelikes really thrive, and I'm not sure how I feel about Monster Menu's take on it. Balancing out each character's stats can be a chore, and the sheer amount one has to do to get back to where they were on the previous run can be more than a little daunting. Sure you can skip to any area you've already been to, but the difficulty at trying these areas at level 1 really made me regret it each time I went for it. Also, I haven't really discussed difficulty at all yet, but Monster Menu is a VERY HARD game. Its only saving grace is that you're able to change the game's difficulty from the camp menu. That said, even on the easiest settings though there are still many seemingly random difficulty spikes, especially coming when its nighttime and all the monsters grow stronger. Thankfully, unlike many other roguelikes, you're basically allowed to save scum if things get too hard for you since the game doesn't penalize you for quitting and reloading at a game over. A certain amount of replayability is require in any game of this type, but I found myself wishing I could just somehow become strong enough to not have to go back to camp again. I often found myself willing to try just about anything to get the game to end.

Night fighting can be kind of annoying actually.

The boss encounters are cool though.

In short I can't really recommend Monster Menu: The Scavenger's Cookbook. It's not a BAD game, but doesn't quite feel like a finished one. One annoying note that I want to mention here in conclusion is that the game has a menu where you can see all the DLC you currently have installed. Since this review took place pre-release I can't really say what the DLC will eventually be, but it really comes off as a slap in the face considering all the parts of the game that feel completely unfinished. While unknown, one can only assume that anyone playing through Monster Menu will eventually be subjected to lots of micro-transactions down the road. Hopefully that DLC eventually includes an actual story pack so I have a greater idea of what is actually going on in the universe, All that aside, if you're a big fan of roguelikes, and especially want one with a cool anime art style, then you might find some enjoyment here. Otherwise you're probably better off ordering a pizza instead of eating that questionable plate of eyeballs.

For More Information on Monster Menu: The Scavenger's Cookbook:
https://www.nisamerica.com/monster-menu/

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Story: C-
Gameplay: C-
Graphics: B-
Sound: A
Value: C-

OVERALL: C-

Pros:
+ The gameplay loop can become really addictive once you get used to it.
+ There's a lot of room for experimentation in equipment, food eaten, and even in difficulty.
+ The music is just incredible, especially the battle themes.
+ Offers a lot of replay ability both within each playthrough, as well as trying again with different party builds.

Cons:
- While fun, there isn't a whole lot to this game in terms of depth.
- Graphics can be cute, for the main party members at least, but many feel generic and outdated.
- The first are, The Ruins, is the worst intro section in a game I've played in recent memory.
- The DLC option front and center in the menu makes one feel that Monster Menu isn't as complete a game as it could've been.

A copy of this game was provided to us free-of-charge by the publisher for the purpose of this review. This did not affect our review in any way.

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Save me from ever having to do The Ruins again.