Monster Menu: The Scavenger’s Cookbook Review (PS5)

Do I really have to eat this?

I was pretty sold on Monster Menu: The Scavenger’s Cookbook right when it was first shown. Not only were the characters featured in its key art was cute, I do like some dungeon crawling, and how can I resist a game with a cooking mechanic. The tactical combat did make me take a bit of a pause, but it seemed exciting and something I wouldn’t be able to tear myself away from. With Monster Menu open for business, how is it?

Before diving into anything, you do need to make your character, so I’ll go into customization first. The customization here, while cute, is just a mix and match type of deal. What you’re really picking is what outfit and body type you want you and your teammates to have. There are eight presets for most of the parts of the character’s looks, but you do get more options for what color you want the hair, eyes, skin, and outfit to have. It’s pretty limited and I wished there were at least a couple more hairstyles to choose from. Let me have a cute bob or a longer ponytail! You can also choose their personality which I’m not sure what it affects other than their bio snippet. You can also edit that character’s pose and crop areas for specific instances, which is pretty cool.

More importantly though, you’ll pick that character’s class from Jobless to Mage. This mainly determines your stats, starter weapon, and skills you start out with. It also determines whether or not that character will be able to learn magic down the road for any non-Mage characters. This doesn’t affect what weapons that character can wield, after all what class you chose is hidden in the character’s bio, but you do need a weapon that matches the skill for any weapon-specific skills.

Monster Menu: The Scavenger’s Cookbook starts with your character in a dire situation. You are an adventurer that trained at a town named Piohne. To test your skills, you decided to go into a beginner dungeon known as the Sealed Lands. However, something happens. You can’t seem to find the exit, which leads you wandering for three days until your last supplies are gone. Starving, dehydrated, and close to death, you stumble upon a dead monster and with no other choices…you eat it. Doing this saves your life, but you pass out (probably due to how disgusting it must have tasted). When you wake up you find yourself strangely in a totally different place, but at least it looks like to be an old campsite. However, when you venture out and end up dying you wake up back at the old campsite. Feeling confused and helpless, you wish for other adventures to come and help you escape and strangely enough that happens. After that, you and your new teammates venture out to find the exit and help each other survive.

*gag*

You do also get to customize your teammates to your liking and try to build a good team without knowing much (unless you’re okay with restarting to test out different builds). Just make sure you make as many characters you want (I recommend filling out all three slots) before finishing. Not only is difficulty also dependent on how many characters you make, but you won’t be able to add any more after this.

And that’s pretty much it. You do get story snippets in the form of notes you can randomly find about a different group and notes with a mysterious writer you get when you beat each boss, but it feels like such an afterthought. Especially when you can easily look over the scavenged noted in your inventory, you have no idea who these characters are, and no one really reacts in a way to add it as another objective (like find all the notes to solve this mystery) alongside simply making it to Floor 100. You can easily just ignore the notes and it won’t affect anything.

When you’re ready to venture out of your campsite base and start an expedition, you’ll find yourself faced with a floor that’s a sizeable open space. Here, you can run around looking for the stairs up, come across scavenging spots to get items and materials (while keeping an eye at your weight limit and throwing away any junk), and hide or confront monsters roaming around. When you or a monster runs into each other, combat will start. You can ambush monsters by colliding with them when their back is turned, while monsters can ambush you if you’re facing away or when you’re in the middle of scavenging.

Battles in Monster Menu is a turn-based tactical situation. Upon colliding, a grid will pop up and all of your teammates will pop out to help. It’s also worth noting that enemies within range will also be drawn in. During your turn, you can freely move your character in their movement area (which I honestly really liked) and get close enough to attack…or at least move closer to attack next turn. Of course, your team and the enemies will trade hits, but there is some interesting aspects. You can actually force feed enemies ingredients that are expired or have negative effect attached to it and you can devour corpses. If it’s a battle against multiple enemies, you can devour a monster corpse to recover stats and gain a temporary ability. You can also devour a teammate if one should fall in battle, which is a bit more morbid, but I’m sure they’re fine with it. After battle you can then scavenge ingredients from the monster corpses to use in dishes.

However, you don’t just have to keep your eye on everyone’s health while on your expedition. You also have to keep a tab on everyone’s Calories and Hydration, which drains as time pass, when using skills, or when sprinting. Running out of either one will put a constant drain on your health instead and that is definitely best to try and avoid.

There are also altars where you can pick up buffs or curses with crystals you get when defeating enemies, although strangely enough separately. I’m not sure if picking a curse gives you a hidden perk, but why I would pick up a curse that raises enemy difficulty or calorie drain when I can just pick the choice that just gives me a small boost in all of my stats without? The only altar choice that has a trade off is the one that lets you revive a teammate.

When you get to the stairs, you can choose to continue or set up camp and rest before continuing. A lot of the time you will be resting though. Resting is the same as being at your campsite base with the exception of being able to sleep and cook. Here you can craft items with what you scavenged like arrows, repair/enhance kits, or more cooking equipment. You can also dissemble items if needed, go into your inventory to prep ingredients (which you’re not told about unless you dig into the game’s notebook and look in the help guide), change everyone’s equipment, and change your starting battle formation. When in the middle of an expedition, you can cook meals to feed to your characters. Cooking dishes will be a big source of Calories and/or Hydration and you can get some stat boosts or passive skills. Of course, eating raw ingredients (and the fabled bottled water) can still help you in a pinch. Though, you do need to keep an eye on Happiness as having it low will have the character act on their own during battle. So no making your characters eat bugs and rocks too much before giving them a real meal.

And lastly, resting lets you change it to day or night and heal your characters, but it gives a huge hit to Calories and Hydration. Wait there’s a day and night cycle? Kind of. You won’t know unless you look for it, but it slightly darkens after 6pm and monsters are more powerful during this time.

The Sealed Lands is 100 floors, with every ten floors being its own layer (or Orgonne) with a boss at the end. Each layer also kind of serves as different biomes, as some layers can make hydration drain faster for example, but there’s not a lot of variation so you’ll find yourself in a forest-y area most of the time. Luckily, when you do beat a layer boss, you can set up a camp there to serve as a base so you can start there instead of Floor 1.

The expedition dies once your character, the party leader, dies (no matter if you have other teammates alive). You are sent back to your base and you lose your levels, skills from food, materials (unless you’re on Easy), and any traps you made (unless on Easy). Your growth does seem to be mainly dependent on what equipment you manage to find, which hopefully you got some with good skills attached to them. Though, your level does still matter so you may need to start at a previous layer until you feel your equipment is good enough to compensate until you get caught up level-wise.

There’s also Monster Houses

When I’m trying to think of why I felt the way I did about Monster Menu I think one word really encompasses what I felt: empty. Monster Menu just felt…empty. It’s a strange word to settle on considering this game’s genre, I know, but the nonexistent story, no interactions, the grind, and how each floor is an open space big enough for everything to feel too scattered and looks like it’s floating in nothingless made me feel this way. And wrapped in all this is the strange absence in the music department. Yes, there is a battle theme and character creator music, but other than that? It’s just the sound of the wind blowing outside of battle, with the crackling of fire if you’re at camp. Not only did this really make this game feel emptier to me, but it was also a missed opportunity to have your campsite and each layer to have their own theme to fit its aesthetics (even if it’s just variations on the same song). Or at least just a theme for the campsite and exploring to exemplify how safe your camp is and how on edge you are while venturing out.

Also did I mention how annoying the voiced lines are? Your character talks at every chance they get and it’s annoying.

Verdict

I was disappointed in Monster Menu: The Scavenger’s Cookbook. It seemed like the kind of game I would like, it being a mystery dungeon game (or at least really close to being one) and having the interesting concept of eating food you cooked up with what you found or defeated, but it just felt empty and too slow. Combine that with not really having anything to compel you to do the same thing for all 100 floors (and the inevitable rinse and repeats) and you have a recipe that’s boring, gets stale quickly, and isn’t compelling enough to be in the clean plate club.

I wanted to like this game, and I really tried to, but the more I played the more it cemented that I wasn’t enjoying my time.

Maybe if you’re someone that doesn’t need much to motivate you to climb 100 floors and grinding so you can face the difficult monsters this might appeal to you. There is a demo for Monster Menu though, which I highly recommend trying before buying (and I wished I tried). I’ve heard the demo is the first layer, or first 10 floors, and since you’ll pretty much be doing the same thing though the rest of the 90 floors I’d say the demo would be a good indicator on whether or not you’ll enjoy the full game.