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Summary
- Beastro is an upcoming cozy/crunchy fantasy restaurant game from Timberline Studio.
- Director Lindsey Rostal told us about its thoughtful blend of cozy games with deckbuilding and traditional, trick-taking card games.
- It arrives on Xbox Series X|S and Xbox on PC this spring, including day one on Game Pass Ultimate.
Start by sautéing a cozy base of “what if I got to be the cat chefs in Monster Hunter?”
Add diced WarioWare and Slay the Spire for crunch.
Season with Paper Mario and a dash of “Avatar: The Last Airbender.”
Simmer in a broth of traditional trick-taking card games. Cover and cook.
Baby, you’ve got a stew going!
I recently sat down with Timberline Studio Director Lindsey Rostal at a coffee shop in our shared home of Los Angeles to discuss their upcoming fantasy restaurant game, Beastro, after playing the opening hour or so in a PC demo. It’s the studio’s sophomore effort, following their 2020 debut narrative dogsledding game The Red Lantern, which she described as “a sort of narrative Oregon Trail with run-based replayability, where it’s more about the journey than the ending.”
Cozy/Crunchy
Rostal told me that the essence of Timberline Studio’s games is “cozy/crunchy—a vibrant world that offers a cozy space, but something with a little bit more meat, a little bit more crunch for your gameplay.” Like well-prepared food, it’s all about balance: charming and low-stakes enough to be inviting and relaxing, but with enough mechanical crunch to stay engaging where many other cozy games coast on pleasant vibes alone.
In Beastro you play as Panko, an anthropomorphic caracal cat serving as apprentice to the idyllic village of Palo Pori’s chef, whose disappearance is the game’s inciting incident. In taking over the restaurant you have to grow and gather ingredients, learn and prepare recipes, and feed the community, most importantly the Caretakers who go beyond Palo Pori’s walls to defend the community against monsters.
I was immediately taken by Beastro’s vibrant color and interesting visual design. Like the best cozy games, Palo Pori seems like a pleasant place just to hang out.
Cozy classic farming and life sims like Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing inform the various gardening, fishing, and gathering systems that generate ingredients for you to use. As the game unfolds you employ the town’s blacksmith and other merchants to upgrade your kitchen and whatnot. To cook for the villagers every night you chop, boil, and sauté ingredients in WarioWare-inspired minigames that will gradually increase in complexity as the game goes on. All of these interlocking systems are relatively simple unto themselves, stripped down to avoid unnecessary complexity and maintain overall flow and balance.
Everything Changed When the Salty Nation Attacked
As mentioned above, the seed for Beastro came from wanting to play as the Monster Hunter series’ adorable Palicoes that prepare food for the players between hunts in impossibly cute cooking animations. That’s more than just a charming elevator pitch—it’s about what kinds of heroism we choose to valorize. “You don’t have to be swinging the sword and lopping off the heads of your enemies to be a hero,” Rostal says. “They’re made more powerful because they’re being supported by others, and to me that’s just such an important conceit, that strength doesn’t necessarily have to come from the big sword, but it can come from being there, in showing up and supporting other people, in building that foundation for others.”
The animated series “Avatar: The Last Airbender” came up as an influence, both for this collaborative, stronger-together ethos, but also for Beastro’s worldbuilding. Where Avatar uses the four classical elements of earth, fire, wind, and water to structure the peoples and metaphysics of its world, Beastro uses the five core flavors: Salty, Bitter, Sweet, Sour, and Umami. “It’s these different food cultures coming together. It’s them not being as powerful alone.”
Each flavor corresponds to one of the regions of the world, as well as to the peoples that live there, including the game’s Caretakers. “It was really important for us that when we did the flavor factions that they didn’t linearly assign to a culture because those flavors exist across all cultures, Umami is a flavor that’s used in cooking all across the world in various forms, it’s not limited to one place. So for me it was really about trying to anthropomorphize the flavors themselves. For instance, when I think about Bitter, I think about black coffee, right, and I think about kale, and this conceit of like healing, and a little bit of pompousness. Kalan is bitter caretaker and he’s very much focused on the mission, plays by the rules. He’s very principle-defined and acts a bit like he knows better than everybody.”
The Heart of the Chard
The masterstroke that I think really elevates and ties the whole thing together is that the flavors also serve as suits in the card game for Beastro’s other major component. Each night you feed one of the Caretakers, with each ingredient that you use contributing cards to their deck for battles in their adventures outside of town. All ingredient cards have a flavor suit and a numerical value, and some have additional special effects when played.
The card battles are framed as if being told after the fact by the Caretaker in a puppet theater, with a really charming paper cutouts lifted directly out of the Paper Mario RPG series, which Rostal also said informed the light, witty tone of the writing. This papercraft aesthetic led to some unexpectedly delightful moments in my playthrough, such as when a monster breathed fire on me, which actually singed the cards in my hand, but the cards in the sweet suit caramelized, giving them an additional effect. This kind of clever attention to detail defined my time with Beastro.
Rostal loves and pulled liberally from the thriving roguelike deckbuilder genre, but ended up going with a deceptively simple, classic core for the card game, in part out of consideration for not scaring off more casual players. “I love Magic, Pokémon, obviously Slay the Spire, your Monster Trains, etc., but I understand that looking at some of those can feel daunting for a player that’s maybe mostly been playing Animal Crossing who’s drawn to the cozy vibes of Beastro. So we pulled it towards more traditional card games, which a lot of people grew up playing with their families. We got really into playing a lot of trick-taking games like Spades, Hearts, Euchre, Bid Whist, etc. It was very fun to take a deep-dive into global trick-taking games.”
We spoke about how recent indie darling roguelike Balatro made something extremely successful out of the building blocks of poker hands, and how much untapped value is still to be gained from iterating on traditional games. “These foundations have stood the test of time for a reason.” As something of a card game sicko myself, I thought the taste I got of Beastro’s card battles was very promising. The trick-taking core made it easy to just jump in and play hands, but there was clearly a lot more to wrap my head around as I unlock more recipes and Caretakers, and thus more deckbuilding possibilities.
Go Outside and Cook Something
One of Beastro’s biggest influences wasn’t from other games or media at all, but the city we live in. “Los Angeles is a food city. It’s a city that has a lot of cultures where everything is kind of fused together and we have these neighborhoods that are incredibly vibrant and different. I’ve thrown a few item shoutouts into our menu that are definitely from places around the city, as my homage to this place.” Rostal gave me several recommendations of places to check out in the neighborhood where we met and clearly knows her stuff. The inclusion of real, beloved LA dishes in the game’s recipes speaks to a sense of warmth and care that permeates Beastro.
She hopes that this material grounding can extend forward from the game as well. “One thing that I like with games is the ability to also inspire people to maybe look outside or learn something they didn’t know before. We tried to use the flavor pairings as exactly as we could, so if you didn’t know that salty balances sweet, you can take and use that in the real world. Or maybe you didn’t know what aguachile is and want to go try it.”
It’s actually already started—she told me that play testers on their Discord have been excitedly posting pictures of new recipes they’ve cooked, inspired by the game to expand their horizons. I can see why—I was thoroughly charmed by Beastro and its thoughtful blend of ideas and influences into a world all their own, and I am excited to see more of what Rostal and her team at Timberline are cooking.
Beastro arrives on Xbox Series X|S and Xbox on PC this spring, including day one on Game Pass Ultimate.
Beastro
Timberline Studios
Palo Pori is a beautiful and peaceful village of artisans and tastemakers. Beyond the village’s protective wall, darkness has begun to stir. Ravenous monsters have claimed the land and threaten to sink their teeth into this final morsel of hope and happiness.
Play as Panko, a young, talented chef, helping to run the local eatery. When Panko’s teacher goes missing, a mysterious visitor arrives with warnings of the dangers beyond the wall. It’s up to Panko to step up and take over the restaurant and tend to the ingredients and patrons. But that’s not all, Panko also finds himself serving the Caretakers, brave adventurers, sent to save the world. In this adventure, preserving peace starts in the kitchen!
FEATURES – WHAT’S ON THE MENU?
FROM TOWN TO TABLE
In Palo Pori, fresh is best! Gather ingredients and resources, care for animals and grow your own fruit and veg to build up your very own cozy town to table restaurant. Forage for wild herbs and unlock new seeds to grow to expand your meals.
SERVING YOUR COMMUNITY
Chop, flip, and sizzle your way through mouthwatering mini-games as you whip up delightful dishes for the townsfolk. Good food is always better with company, so work hard to improve your cooking and experiment with ingredients, to keep your patrons happy.
Tailor your restaurant to the tastes of your community, develop new meals, progress your know how through a skill tree and adjust the decor to increase your restaurant’s appeal.
FEED THE CARETAKERS
You’ll also need to feed the hungry Caretakers; these brave denizens of the land will venture out into the wilds to fight the ravenous monsters threatening the peace of Palo Pori. Each Caretaker hails from their own flavour region, affecting their own tastes and preferences: some like it bitter, some like it sweet and some are just looking to fulfil their craving of the day! Craft thoughtful meals and balance the flavour profiles to boost their spirits, sharpen their skills, and unlock new abilities. Because let’s face it… Who can save the world on an empty stomach?
DELICIOUS DECK BUILDING
Now it’s time to put your meal to the test! This is where taste meets tactics. The dishes you serve will build your Caretaker’s deck – each ingredient unlocking a card. And once they’ve eaten, they’ll venture into the wilds to fight the monsters. Upon their return, they’ll recount their journey and play out their battles through a charming puppet theatre sequence. They might even bring you back some MONSTEROUS ingredients from their ventures. Fight the monsters in turn-based deck building combat, inspired by traditional trick-taking card games. Outplay the monsters, by matching their flavour magic or neutralising it with a balancing card. Add an enhancing card to power up your moves! Your magic can turn the tables!
Utilize the unique effects of your ingredients to put your enemies to sleep, blow away their cards, and more, but watch out, you’re not the only one with special abilities. If you’re not paying attention, you might get burned.
In this food-based fantasy adventure, it’s time to give peas a chance! – Are you ready to get cooking?
Unlock the magic in food.
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Will Fulton, Xbox Wire Editor
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