Monster Menu: The Scavenger's Cookbook Review
Monster Menu: The Scavenger’s Cookbook plays like a mix between a Mystery Dungeon game, with elements of Disgaea and perhaps a little bit of Dragon Quest Builders. You get to design your own character picking from quite a large cast of class types. The colourful character designs are great and right away you can tell this is a Nippon Ichi Software from the art style alone. Once you’ve created your character, you are introduced to the game’s two main mechanics exploration and survival. There’s a brief tutorial that demonstrates the ability to scavenge food from monsters and the basics of combat before throwing you into the world properly.
The story of Monster Menu is borderline non-existent with the real game focusing more on the core mechanics of survival, which is fine by me but I could see why that might be a turn-off for some.
Each floor in the dungeon is represented by a 3D plain that you and your party members traverse. The main goal is to get the exit as soon as possible. Unlike Disgaea, you have free movement across the maps which allows you to try and avoid enemies or attack them head-on. Upon touching an enemy, there will be a seamless battle transition which takes place on a Disgaea style grid to denote just how far you can move.
Turn order is decided by who initiates the battle, if an enemy approaches you from behind they can ambush your party, thus getting the first attack. You can use this system to your advantage and sneak up on enemies from behind to ambush them, but it’s easier said than done, especially with some of the enemy’s erratic movement patterns. Battles are turn-based and you select your abilities from the menu all of which have their own unique ranges etc which seem to be lifted directly from Disgaea albeit with the ability to freely move your character.
The luck-based nature of the procedurally generated levels means the number of monsters on each floor is random and choosing whether to fight or avoid enemies becomes its own factor as battling costs precious resources such as HP, calories and thirst.
If you are desperate, you can consume the corpses of fallen enemies in the field to restore a small amount of these resources but you may end up using a lot more trying to slay them and Monster Menu often becomes a bit of a gamble in that regard. It’s also worth noting that looting the corpses from materials and meats is far more beneficial in the long run as you get to cook with the monster parts you collect which, when done right, will fill much more resource bars while applying a myriad of buffs on each party member who eats it.
While exploring you will eventually have a party member killed on one of your runs either due to starvation, dehydration or good old-fashioned HP depletion. The rest of your party will be able to continue onwards and with luck, you’ll find a shrine. Shrines offer random buffs and boons to choose from including the ability to resurrect fallen party members, so make sure you keep an eye out for them.
If the main protagonist falls in battles, the expedition will be over and all characters will be reset to level 1. You do retain weapons and items so it’s not a complete bust each time and in each attempt, you will learn something to help you survive just that little bit longer. This also makes your next ‘run’ a lot quicker as you can easily defeat enemies and bosses with your higher-level gear.
There’s a ton of weapons and other loot you can find in each map via treasure chests (or mimics!) and they followed the expected colour coding making it easier to differentiate Legendary items from your normal run-of-the-mill items. These can all be broken down into components that will help you craft items to survive longer, so no weapon or item is a complete waste unless you are running out of inventory space.
Monster Menu has a day and night cycle in the game and if night falls while you’re out and about exploring I would suggest you immediately set up and camp and rest until morning as the night powers up the enemies making them much stronger. This kind of reminds me of the later towers in Shiren the Wanderer 5 when the enemies power up massively during the night, thankfully it’s not as extreme as in Shiren, But I would still suggest leaving immediately.
Choosing the rest function at the end of each map allows you to make up a camp to cook food, craft materials and sleep. Sleep will heal your HP but unfortunately won’t do anything for your calorie and thirst meters, in fact, they will be partially drained which can lead to some tricky decisions further on in your runs. Do you eat and heal HP or potentially die from a lack of calories? It’s a fun system to manage and does keep things feeling tense and challenging.
I really like the presentation of Monster Menu, the characters are bright and colourful although I do think the locales do get a little bland with not much variety even as you progress throughout the game. As much as I liked seeing reoccurring Disgaea enemies throughout the game, I did wish there was more variety and often I felt they were just lifted from Disgaea 6 to save time.
Technically, the game performs well on the switch but suffers from a little bit of blurriness, especially when docked. I could be wrong, but the game seems to use the same engine as Disgaea 6 and overall performance is similar to that.
Conclusion
Monster Menu won’t be for everyone, the grind of the game, the occasional RNG unfairness and general repetition will put off some, but personally, I think Monster Menu is great. If you stick with the game and learn its systems you’ll find a very rewarding dungeon crawler that quickly becomes quite addictive.
If you like the Mystery Dungeon series or games such as Zanki-Zero, I would highly recommend picking up a copy of Monster Menu, however, if you are looking for an in-depth, story-rich RPG I would suggest you look elsewhere.
7
Nintendo Switch review code kindly provided by NIS America