Monster Menu: The Scavenger’s Cookbook Review

thesixthaxis.com:

A dungeon-crawling JRPG roguelike is one of the last genre blends I ever expected to see, but here we are. It’s an especially surprising experiment coming from NIS America, a studio so well-known for the grind-embracing gluttony of JRPGs like Disgaea where the thrill is in amassing a wealth of EXP, a collection of items, and a permanent hoard of loot. There’s very little permanence to Monster Menu: The Scavenger’s Cookbook, though. Instead, NIS America has cooked up a repeatable dungeon dive with an infusion of survival and cooking mechanics that is always challenging you to do just one more run – although sometimes, it isn’t all that exciting to take the game up on that offer.

Monster Menu: The Scavenger’s Cookbook kicks off with a paper-thin story – you’re an adventurer who set off for a region called the Sealed Lands, but you end up stranded there without supplies. After finding a base camp and miraculously meeting three other customisable adventurers, your new crew has to find a way to escape the endlessly randomised realm of the Sealed Lands. There’s basically no story in the game to speak of beyond these opening moments – not even party banter or silly, one-off dialogue – which is a shame when games like Hades provide an experience that dishes out gameplay progression and character story beats equally. You’d think that kind of blend would work wonders with the wacky worlds and characters NIS is so great at making, but we lack this kind of narrative personality that the studio is known.

Starting a run in Scavenger’s Cookbook drops you into the first floor of the first themed Orgonne region: the Ruins. Each of these floors is slightly randomised, but only slightly with their layouts rarely offer any unique movement or