Beastro preview: a delicious roguelite riff on cozy gaming

This genre mashup adds some spice to the farm-sim meatball

When you hear the term cozy game, a set menu of gameplay offerings leaps immediately to mind: farming, crafting, fishing, and cooking. Beastro, the upcoming game from indie developer-publisher Timberline Studio, has all of those elements. But it mixes up the familiar recipe by adding a sprinkling of tactical deck-building combat. Having spent some time with the game ahead of The Game Awards earlier this week, it’s clear that all these ingredients harmonize remarkably well around Beastro’s central ideas of food and flavor.

Set in a town full of adorable animals, you play as Panko, a talented yet anxious chef who’s tasked with running the local eatery in the hamlet of Palo Pori. Beyond the town walls, however, there’s trouble afoot. Just when Panko’s boss goes missing, an injured god called Flambé appears in the village, seeking a place to recover after. As Panko, you’ll wrangle all the daily tasks of running the restaurant — tending to crops, gathering ingredients, and maintaining the decor to attract customers. You’ll also be able to craft items to help you do all of those things, from planting beds to meat tenderizing machines and enticing table-settings. You’re incentivized to decorate with bonus earnings and more diners, but there’s no need to min-max the furniture or aesthetic to bring in the big bucks.

Beastro doesn’t neglect the actual cooking, either. Mise-en-place, the French term for preparing and chopping ingredients ahead of preparing food, is a major component in the game, and that’s where the Cooking Mama vibes come in. For instance, as you simmer a fatty chunk of meat, you’ll have to waggle the frypan to avoid hotspots that will cause it to burn. Boiling water isn’t an especially captivating activity in real life, but here it’s more like a pop-a-shot carnival game. All of these stovetop minigames are brief and fun, and serve to jangle up the pacing of a notoriously sleepy genre. Even if you stink at one or all of them, they’re mostly a chance to earn bonuses rather than avoid punishment.

In addition to feeding hungry townsfolk, you’ll also need to prepare nourishing and invigorating meals for Caretakers, the brawny beasts who protect each of Beastro’s walled villages. While Panko won’t be venturing into the dangers beyond Palo Pori’s walls, he will get a rundown of a particular Caretaker’s latest exploits in the town’s Puppet Theater. That’s where the game’s combat comes in, and the perspective shifts into the 2D view of Beastro’s deck-building combat. The dishes you serve create the Caretaker’s deck of combat cards, and each one is color-coded with a flavor trait, like spicy or sweet. Some traits neutralize one another, while other pairings make both components more powerful. Keeping these flavor relationships in mind, each round you’ll aim to choose a card that can deal more damage to your opponent, or potentially set up a powerful combo. Each battle requires some thinking and strategy — and there are occasional turns where you won’t have a good card and just have to take your lumps. But the fights never overstay their welcome.

You’ll (vicariously) encounter a number of menacingly adorable creatures in the Puppet Theater, from prancing wooden pigs to forest critters who’ve gotten all hopped-up on the power of flaming tomatoes. The papercraft visuals here are an adorable highlight, and I was especially fond of umami Caretaker Oyshi’s design: he’s broad-grinned, yeti-like beast with a little trickle of drool and a mop of browning banana peels on his head. The character designs elsewhere in the game don’t disappoint either, with gentle-eyed purple livestock and spinach-tailed squirrels wherever you look.

I came away from my demo of Beastro feeling like I’d only just scratched the surface of all there is to do. After a few nibbles, the sporadic bursts of roguelite combat feels like a brilliant way to mix up the predictable pacing of a farm-life sim. And with a whole bunch of surrounding villages that need Panko’s help, it seems like one that’ll keep you busy for dozens of hours. Beastro launches in spring 2026 for PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox Game Pass, and Xbox Series X.