Beastro Wiki

Beastro is a "crunchy cozy" cooking adventure from Timberline Studio, the creators of The Red Lantern. You play as Panko, a young and talented caracal chef in the walled village of Palo Pori. When Panko’s teacher goes missing and a mysterious visitor warns of dangers beyond the wall, Panko must take over the local eatery – and start feeding the Caretakers, the brave adventurers sent to save the world.

The hook is a structural inversion of the deckbuilder genre: instead of combat producing your cards, cooking does. Every ingredient you grow, forage, fish or buy carries a flavor and a power value, and every dish you serve to a Caretaker builds the deck they take into turn-based, trick-taking battles against the ravenous monsters outside the walls. Battles play out as charming puppet theatre sequences, and victorious Caretakers bring back monster ingredients you can cook with the next day.

Beastro was built to be a first deckbuilder: cards show just a number and a flavor suit, so anyone who has played a traditional card game can pick it up in minutes – while flavor balancing, card effects and deck synergies give veterans plenty to chew on.

Each in-game day in Beastro is split into three phases, and learning to use each one efficiently is the core skill of the early game. Time is a resource: ingredients you skip in the morning are dishes you cannot cook at night.

Palo Pori runs on a "town to table" philosophy: most of what you cook is grown, gathered or fished by you. Each ingredient carries three things that matter – a flavor suit, a power value, and often a special effect – so your pantry is literally your card collection.

Sources expand as you progress. Your garden produces reliable staples and unlocks new seeds over time; the shop fills gaps for money; wild herbs and flowers rotate around town between day and night; fishing adds another channel of ingredients; and animals you care for provide produce. The rarest ingredients are MONSTROUS: brought back by Caretakers from successful expeditions, they tend to carry high power values and strong effects.

Caretakers are the heroes who fight on your behalf – you never swing a sword in Beastro, you cook. Each Caretaker hails from one of the five flavor regions, which shapes their palate, their preferences and the abilities they can unlock. The first to arrive is Oyshi, who comes in hungry, asks for a dish that satisfies a specific craving (eggs, on his debut), and later recruits other Caretakers to Palo Pori.

One Caretaker with a reservation visits during each dinner service. Cooking to their likes grants health and attack boosts, deepens your friendship, and unlocks new card abilities; an umami-rich meal unlocks different combat cards than a sour-dominant one. Some Caretakers also chase a "craving of the day", a rotating request worth planning your morning around.

Do not just feed everyone their favorite flavor on repeat. Their decks need variety to handle whatever the wilds throw at them – a Caretaker fed nothing but sweets will struggle the moment a monster resists sweet.

Battles are turn-based deckbuilding combat inspired by traditional trick-taking card games like Whist, Spades and Euchre – and they play out as puppet theatre, narrated when your Caretaker returns home. You watch how the meal you cooked performed in the field.

The core decision each trick: match the monster’s flavor magic to outplay it, neutralise it with a balancing card, or commit an enhancing card to power up your own move. Ingredient effects add tactical spice – put enemies to sleep, blow away their cards – but monsters have special abilities too, and an unprepared deck gets burned.

Beastro ships with 42 Steam achievements (with equivalent achievement lists on Xbox). They span the full breadth of the game: story chapter completions across the four flavor biomes, restaurant milestones, recipe and ingredient collection, Caretaker friendships, and combat feats in the trick-taking battles.

Most unlock naturally across a full playthrough. For completionists, the long poles are collection-style goals – cooking every recipe, growing every seed, befriending every Caretaker – so start varied cooking early rather than settling into one comfortable menu.

Beastro is built in Unreal Engine 5 but targets modest hardware. Official Steam requirements: