A dungeon-crawling JRPG roguelike is one of the last genre blends I ever expected to see, but here we are. It’s an especially surprising experiment coming from NIS America, a studio so well-known for the grind-embracing gluttony of JRPGs like Disgaea where the thrill is in amassing a wealth of EXP, a collection of items, and a permanent hoard of loot. There’s very little permanence to Monster Menu: The Scavenger’s Cookbook, though. Instead, NIS America has cooked up a repeatable dungeon dive with an infusion of survival and cooking mechanics that is always challenging you to do just one more run – although sometimes, it isn’t all that exciting to take the game up on that offer.
Monster Menu: The Scavenger’s Cookbook kicks off with a paper-thin story – you’re an adventurer who set off for a region called the Sealed Lands, but you end up stranded there without supplies. After finding a base camp and miraculously meeting three other customisable adventurers, your new crew has to find a way to escape the endlessly randomised realm of the Sealed Lands. There’s basically no story in the game to speak of beyond these opening moments – not even party banter or silly, one-off dialogue – which is a shame when games like Hades provide an experience that dishes out gameplay progression and character story beats equally. You’d think that kind of blend would work wonders with the wacky worlds and characters NIS is so great at making, but we lack this kind of narrative personality that the studio is known.
Starting a run in Scavenger’s Cookbook drops you into the first floor of the first themed Orgonne region: the Ruins. Each of these floors is slightly randomised, but only slightly with their layouts rarely offer any unique movement or exploration challenges. You’ll mostly just be fighting enemies, scavenging, and repeating until you reach the final floor where the Orgonne boss lives. Defeat it and you’ll unlock a teleport point to the next Orgonne so you can always start there from now on.
There’s an element of mindless fun to the simple layouts of each floor – it’s sort of a bite-sized offering of contextless JRPG battles – and in a vacuum they’re fun enough. It’s all too easy to ignore battles and just move to the next floor thanks to the simple layout of each room, but since your levels and food-provided skills reset on death, you do have a bit of an incentive to try and tackle as many battles as you can to prep for the final boss of the Orgonne.
Oh, yeah. Food gives you skills. Food is huge in Monster Menu… but maybe not as huge as it could be. Most of the items you scavenge on a floor will be cooking materials like hay, flowers, and monster parts, and your characters have Calorie and Hydration meters that are constantly draining, so your goal is to return to camp after each floor to cook dishes and feed them to your crew.
There’s something fascinating about the idea of a JRPG where your strongest skill is cooking, but the game and UI design just don’t back it up here. You never feel too involved in the food prep process, like you would with the cooking or crafting minigames in games like Atelier Ryza or Cooking Mama. You just pick a pre-determined recipe and the game automatically grabs the ingredients you need. The meals you can create from random ingredient combos are reliant on your characters cooking skill level as well, so that sense of discovery you might hope for in whipping together random ingredients is seldom rewarded in the early game.
The overall package here feels light, especially in the early hours. With no story, minimal room or enemy variety, and a basic cooking mechanic, Monster Menu lacks the immediate variety and meta-progression that make other roguelikes excel at to really hook players.
As you unlock more Orgonnes and can more consistently build high-level characters, the game gets a bit more satisfying. It ends up feeling less like a tactical roguelike, though, and more like a JRPG Simulator where you plan skill and gear combos that promise an interesting party composition, then dive into the Orgonne to level them up and test just how well their synergy delivers.
I can’t see general roguelike enjoyers feeling all that immersed in exploring the Sealed Lands, but if you’re JRPG obsessed and love the idea of being able to quickly jump into bite sized encounters like this, you could create your own magic and cook up a fun dungeon-diving experience. It’s just a snack-sized one rather than a three-course meal.
