ShanghaiRabbit
New member
New member here, hello hello.
Originally I was going to discuss multiple games I've been playing, but I went so hard on describing the first one that it's just the one.
One game I've been playing is a game by the name of Monster Menu: The Scavenger's Cookbook.
Originally I was going to discuss multiple games I've been playing, but I went so hard on describing the first one that it's just the one.
One game I've been playing is a game by the name of Monster Menu: The Scavenger's Cookbook.
An odd little experience, you control a small party of up to four modular characters, exploring an ever changing dungeon in a bid to escape. It's a grid based RPG, with Final Fantasy Tactics style mechanics (for example, the direction in which you face the enemy in regards to their orientation affects your hit rates. Attacking an enemy head on leads to drastically reduced damage and hit rate, as opposed to aiming from the side, or from behind.)
Monster Menu has a twist, however. It's a roguelite. You explore, you progress, you die, you get sent back to the start of the dungeon at level 1, while keeping your equipment and even a few stats you had prior to your untimely demise. This results in a fairly difficult early game, but you ev eventually snowball, as your level 1 stats rival foes upwards to the 30s and beyond.
Unfortunately, Monster Menu isn't a perfect game without its flaws. The key mechanic can be a chore to work around, ESPECIALLY considering how fast food spoilage can happen. In this game, each character has a Calorie and Hydration bar, on top of a Health bar. Health bar is self explanatory, you hit 0, you die. Game over, ggs, get outta here! The Calorie and Hydration bars, both, take the role of simultaneously your STAMINA and your MAGIC POWER. Outside of the grid based combat, you can free roam the dungeon floors, you're not constrained to the aforementioned tiles. While in Free Roam, you can hold the shoulder button to run. This is all fine and dandy, one would expect an option to run, when faced with a timer (which will be discussed shortly). The problem is, you have an individual run meter — this meter combines all of your character's running stats in order to determine its size. When this bar drains, it must refill, and it drains BOTH your Calories and Hydration to do so. This is a problem.
As I have stated earlier, these bars also double over as your MP. Say you have a healer, you want to heal. There's no typical MP bar, so it drains your Calories and Hydration to cast that heal. Heal also isn't cheap. It's 22%, individually, to both bars. This would mean you lose 22% Calories and 22% Hydration, just to cast one Heal spell. This, of course, is a sizable cost. You're losing nearly a quarter of both bars that double as your stamina. You're discouraged from running, but you need to run sometimes to escape from the larger enemies that exist to ruin your day. This leads to a frustrating conundrum where you have to use both bars to cast magic - all magic in the game - as well as run. And if both bars hit 0, then you start draining HP exceptionally quickly.
Fortunately, in-between floors you can enter a rest spot, which allows you to cook and prepare meals from ingredients you've scavenged from both the environment, and your foes. The downside is, food spoils in a matter of minutes from the moment you pick it up. By the time you reach the entrance to the next floor, and by extension the rest area, you'll inevitably have a couple ingredients turned rotten, or at least rather close to it. This is where the game falls apart. You have to fight and scavenge to get food to both heal your HP and fill your Calories and Hydration, but you also have to contend with the food spoilage rates.
And then we get to the time of day. Time in this game progresses fairly quickly. A day starts at 08:00, and ends at 17:00. That isn't to say 18:00 to 07:00 don't exist. They do, it's just considered nighttime. And every single enemy is given absurd buffs to their strength, while giving the exact same experience points they would give in the daytime. You can sleep until 08:00 in any rest spot, but you lose calories and hydration at a rate depending on your difficulty, but regardless of the difficulty, it's an absurdly high rate of loss.
Thankfully, sleeping doesn't cause your ingredients to become rotten, but then that begs the question, why does my meat go rotten in two hours while running, but sleeping for 10+ hours causes no change in its freshness? It's a bizarre choice, and the game would be better off without it. Or rather, tie the freshness to the amount of floors you pass since acquiring the ingredient? Something like 3 floors for it to degrade a tier would be perfectly acceptable, I think.
Oh boy , that sure was a rant. I'm not going to sugarcoat it, the game is rough. It can be a frustrating experience. But, it's also a game I have a fondness for. It's a simultaneously charming and despairing game. Your party members can die, and when you leave combat, you can see their corpse on the ground. You can interact with it, which will give you a portion of their experience. Bizarrely, if you're in combat, you can consume the corpse of your fallen comrade, which does the same but with the added benefit of maxing out your Calorie and Hydration bars. In a way, it speaks to the desperation of the characters in the game. Constantly teetering on starvation and dehydration, mere inches from the clutches of death at all times. Without a second thought, they bite into the flesh of their friend, taking nourishment from the loss, all for the chance to fight one more day and possibly escape.
Man, this game is weird.
Monster Menu has a twist, however. It's a roguelite. You explore, you progress, you die, you get sent back to the start of the dungeon at level 1, while keeping your equipment and even a few stats you had prior to your untimely demise. This results in a fairly difficult early game, but you ev eventually snowball, as your level 1 stats rival foes upwards to the 30s and beyond.
Unfortunately, Monster Menu isn't a perfect game without its flaws. The key mechanic can be a chore to work around, ESPECIALLY considering how fast food spoilage can happen. In this game, each character has a Calorie and Hydration bar, on top of a Health bar. Health bar is self explanatory, you hit 0, you die. Game over, ggs, get outta here! The Calorie and Hydration bars, both, take the role of simultaneously your STAMINA and your MAGIC POWER. Outside of the grid based combat, you can free roam the dungeon floors, you're not constrained to the aforementioned tiles. While in Free Roam, you can hold the shoulder button to run. This is all fine and dandy, one would expect an option to run, when faced with a timer (which will be discussed shortly). The problem is, you have an individual run meter — this meter combines all of your character's running stats in order to determine its size. When this bar drains, it must refill, and it drains BOTH your Calories and Hydration to do so. This is a problem.
As I have stated earlier, these bars also double over as your MP. Say you have a healer, you want to heal. There's no typical MP bar, so it drains your Calories and Hydration to cast that heal. Heal also isn't cheap. It's 22%, individually, to both bars. This would mean you lose 22% Calories and 22% Hydration, just to cast one Heal spell. This, of course, is a sizable cost. You're losing nearly a quarter of both bars that double as your stamina. You're discouraged from running, but you need to run sometimes to escape from the larger enemies that exist to ruin your day. This leads to a frustrating conundrum where you have to use both bars to cast magic - all magic in the game - as well as run. And if both bars hit 0, then you start draining HP exceptionally quickly.
Fortunately, in-between floors you can enter a rest spot, which allows you to cook and prepare meals from ingredients you've scavenged from both the environment, and your foes. The downside is, food spoils in a matter of minutes from the moment you pick it up. By the time you reach the entrance to the next floor, and by extension the rest area, you'll inevitably have a couple ingredients turned rotten, or at least rather close to it. This is where the game falls apart. You have to fight and scavenge to get food to both heal your HP and fill your Calories and Hydration, but you also have to contend with the food spoilage rates.
And then we get to the time of day. Time in this game progresses fairly quickly. A day starts at 08:00, and ends at 17:00. That isn't to say 18:00 to 07:00 don't exist. They do, it's just considered nighttime. And every single enemy is given absurd buffs to their strength, while giving the exact same experience points they would give in the daytime. You can sleep until 08:00 in any rest spot, but you lose calories and hydration at a rate depending on your difficulty, but regardless of the difficulty, it's an absurdly high rate of loss.
Thankfully, sleeping doesn't cause your ingredients to become rotten, but then that begs the question, why does my meat go rotten in two hours while running, but sleeping for 10+ hours causes no change in its freshness? It's a bizarre choice, and the game would be better off without it. Or rather, tie the freshness to the amount of floors you pass since acquiring the ingredient? Something like 3 floors for it to degrade a tier would be perfectly acceptable, I think.
Oh boy , that sure was a rant. I'm not going to sugarcoat it, the game is rough. It can be a frustrating experience. But, it's also a game I have a fondness for. It's a simultaneously charming and despairing game. Your party members can die, and when you leave combat, you can see their corpse on the ground. You can interact with it, which will give you a portion of their experience. Bizarrely, if you're in combat, you can consume the corpse of your fallen comrade, which does the same but with the added benefit of maxing out your Calorie and Hydration bars. In a way, it speaks to the desperation of the characters in the game. Constantly teetering on starvation and dehydration, mere inches from the clutches of death at all times. Without a second thought, they bite into the flesh of their friend, taking nourishment from the loss, all for the chance to fight one more day and possibly escape.
Man, this game is weird.
