Beastro

Beastro was a fun and fresh take on the deck builder/roguelite genre that I had the pleasure to play. From the engaging environment to the fun gameplay, I never once found myself wanting to stop until I got to the end. I would recommend anyone who likes this style of game to give it a try as it is one of the best I have played in a while.

Beastro is correctly pitched as a "cosy, culinary adventure", but it's so much more than that. It's a carefully combined mixture of play styles with deliciously coloured cartoon visuals, a peppering of entertaining mini games, hearty deck-building combat and a belly-warming narrative that leaves you fully sated. And to top it all off, it's incredibly moreish.

Beastro feels like a cosy player’s dream. It successfully combines farming, restaurant management, cooking minigames and deck-building roguelite mechanics into something that feels surprisingly cohesive. Not every element is explained perfectly, and some of the systems can initially feel a little confusing. The boss encounters occasionally felt harsher than I would have liked, too. Yet despite those issues, I found myself consistently enjoying my time with it. What impressed me most is how welcoming the game feels. It never seems interested in punishing the player. Instead, it gently encourages you forward, allowing you to learn, experiment and progress at your own pace. If you’re someone who enjoys cosy games and have perhaps been intimidated by more demanding roguelites in the past, Beastro might be exactly the kind of gateway experience you’re looking for. And if you simply want to spend your evenings growing vegetables, cooking meals, petting strange farm animals and helping save the world one dinner plate at a time, there’s plenty here to love.

Beastro is the kind of game that doesn’t try to compete through complexity or scale, but rather through identity. It builds its experience around a simple cycle: farming, cooking, building your deck, and preparing your guardians—and it finds strength precisely in this well‑tied repetition. There always seems to be a new ingredient and a different recipe to discover, and that can keep you hooked for hours.

Beastro is the kind of game that could only have been born from a small team willing to risk a genre combination too absurd to make sense on paper but that, against all odds, works incredibly well in practice. The causal inversion of cooking generating combat cards is one of the cleverest ideas I’ve seen in a deckbuilder in a long time, and Timberline Studio executed it with real care across every interconnected system.

eastro has a base solid enough not to bore and to be worth it as an experience — what's missing is a bit more careful work to elevate it above the level of mere curiosity. Timberline Studios' talent is obvious and the team deserves a second chance to keep proving themselves; I just wish this one had been it.