Cassette Beasts is a fun RPG that turns monsters into mixtapes

gamedeveloper.com:

Cassette Beasts sees players going out on a monster-collecting adventure, recording creatures onto tapes to use in battle. Players can combine any of these creatures together to form something different, too, offering near-endless possibilities for your team.

Game Developer sat down with Jay Bayliss, director at Bytten Studio, to talk about the challenges that came from creating a monster-fusing system that could combine any creatures in the game, what appealed to them about creating a more humane means of "capturing" monsters, and the appeal of letting the player create and use "unbalanced" monster fusions if they made the game more fun and interesting.

Cassette Beasts combines mix tapes and monsters. What inspired this particular concoction?

Cassettes are cool and old-school, but kind of timeless! When it comes to franchises that involve regular human characters summoning/commanding/manifesting fantastical monsters to battle (whether that be Pokemon, Digimon, YuGiOh, etc.) there’s always a physical element that connects the fantastical and mundane. Whether that thing is capsules, playing cards, or something else, the fantasy is best sold when you can imagine holding something in your hand that bridges the fantasy. Cassette tapes are mundane items that are kind of old school and rooted in a pre-digital era—they’re kind of perfect.

The game offers a complex monster-combining system that lets players combine any monsters together. What drew you to put in this system?

We knew that if we were attempting to establish a new game in the monster-collecting RPG genre, then we needed to have a unique angle that no other game would have. Fusion is something we kept coming back to—it is something very popular among fandoms of games