The Lost Legends of Redwall: Feasts & Friends (PC Review)
Summary: The gameplay of 'Feasts & Friends' is quite messy, but the story and the characters shine through.
3
Cozy
Redwall fans are eating well this month as developers Soma Games have dropped not just one, but two new games set in the world of Brian Jacques’ novels.
‘The Lost Legends of Redwall: Feasts & Friends’ is a cozy little spin-off sequel(ish) game to the much larger ‘The Scout Anthology’, both of which are set about six months before the events of the first novel. While ‘The Scout Anthology’ focuses more on larger-scale storytelling and adventure (find my review of this game also published right here on Impulse Gamer), ‘Feasts & Friends’ instead tells the much smaller story of Chef Rootsworth.
The mission is simple. You are Chef Rootsworth, cook for the Lilygrove Scouts, but you have your eyes on cooking at Redwall Abbey. There is a cook-off coming up and, to help you prepare, you cook a variety of meals for characters from all over Mossflower Wood.
The gameplay loop is very simple. You greet one of your friends with a short dialogue interaction, filled with a lot of heart and written like they are straight out of the novels. It is all written dialogue, there is no voice acting here, but I didn’t find this a deterrent at all as the writing is fantastic.
You then pick a recipe that your guest would like, make sure you have the ingredients, prepare said ingredients, and cook it all up.
There are a bunch of minigames based on what ingredients you need to prepare, which can range from timing-based dicing to the slicing minigame which requires a lot more precision. The preparation portion of this game is probably my least favorite aspect as a lot of the slicing and dicing doesn’t feel very intuitive.
The cooking itself is really fun though, with you following the recipe, tossing ingredients into the pot at just the right time, and seasoning the meal based on what flavor profiles are needed. You are also encouraged to freestyle a bit more in the later part of the game, with parts of the recipe sometimes being obscured, leaving the player to figure out what order you should put the ingredients in.
At the end of the cooking, you are also required to plate up the dishes. This is an element of the game that needs improvement as all plating up involves is dropping the cooked ingredients onto a plate, letting them jiggle around and clip in and out of each other in a very unappetizing way. As anyone who has read the books will know, the food in Redwall is described in great, delicious detail. The end results of your cooking in this game couldn’t look further from that.
However, despite my issues with the cooking portion of this game, it does seem like the developers have a solid roadmap of improvements that they will be working on throughout the year, which does give me hope. In the meantime, I found myself invested in the story and the characters. Even though there isn’t any epic adventuring, the interpersonal relationships between the different characters and the hints and references to the larger world kept me coming back recipe after recipe.
As a bonus point to the game, the soundtrack here is excellent. Just like ‘The Scout Anthology’, I found myself taking a break from the gameplay and listening to the score for a good portion of my time with this game.
There isn’t a whole lot to ‘Feasts & Friends’, most of the time it feels like it would be best suited to being played on a smartphone or on the Switch, however, if you find yourself wanting a little bit more Redwall after finishing ‘The Scout Anthology’, maybe pick up this game. It’s very cheap, very simple, and very cozy.
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