Monster Menu: The Scavenger's Cookbook Reviews
Cooking up monsters in Monster Menu: The Scavenger's Cookbook is a delight but simple gameplay and generic dungeons prevent this unique SRPG from making the most of its potential.
Monster Menu: The Scavenger's Cookbook is a dish that aims to bring together various ideas from dungeon-crawling JRPGs, roguelikes, and cooking games, but only a few satisfying flavours from each of those emerge. Only JRPG addicts with a trained palette will be able to find the enjoyment here to warrant digging into the entire dish.
Monster Menu: The Scavenger's Cookbook may be a rich snack for fans of the genre, but it may prove indigestible to most at the launch price at which it is offered.
Review in Italian | Read full review
Monster Menu: The Scavenger's Cookbook combines cooking and tactics combat to create a rather tasty RPG experience.
If the lead character’s HP reaches zero then it’s game over. All character levels are lost upon defeat, and you’ll have to start the dungeon from the first floor, keeping your equipment and any learned skills. Though the floors are short, it’s best to take your time and level up steadily to make progress in preparation for the potential difficulty spike, otherwise you’ll pay the price for trying to rush through. The game's flow can feel quite protracted as a result, and there’s a certain amount of level grinding from the off.
Monster Menu: The Scavenger's Cookbook is a game with interesting ideas, but one of the most uninteresting executions possible. Nothing in the game goes beyond competent and some points reach the objectively bad, making it certainly a game that exists, but will hardly be remembered.
Review in Portuguese | Read full review
As a (mostly) classical roguelike, Monster Menu is a good time. It’s well-balanced in its efforts to be excruciatingly difficult. It also has an entertaining loot and character development system. Most importantly of all, the core cooking mechanic is engaging. It will force you to approach everything from exploration to battle in a different way than most roguelikes. But I really can’t help but wish the developers made better use of the strong concept. Monster Menu really could have had a compelling, if nightmarish take on humanity’s sheer will for survival.
It took a long time for me to appreciate what Monster Menu: The Scavenger's Cookbook has to offer and once I did, I became hooked thanks to its surprisingly deep strategic survival formula that'll have you scrambling to maintain and grow your party of chibi adventurers.
Not feeling quite like anything else out there, Monster Menu’s mix of action and RPG elements is novel, but lack thrills
Monster Menu combines roguelike dungeon-diving, cooking with monster parts, and tactical battles, and it blends together rather well.