The Lost Legends of Redwall: Feasts & Friends
The Lost Legends of Redwall: Feasts & Friends is more of a spin-off game set in the Redwall universe rather than a continuation of previous stories, although it does build its dialogues upon them. However, the game is designed so that no prior knowledge is required to understand what’s happening in Feasts & Friends.
It’s a pretty basic cooking simulator where you play as Rootsworth, the chef of the Lilygrove mice community. Every day starts by greeting your only customer, chatting a bit with them, then preparing their favorite dish. Each character has likes and dislikes and you’ll have to select the recipe that fits them best, using their preferred ingredients and avoiding the ones they despise. Each ingredient then goes through a slicing / dicing / peeling process (represented by a short minigame). When they are all ready, you can start preparing the actual recipe. This is done according to a timed sequence that indicates which of the ingredients need to be added to the pan at which moments of the timeframe, when to shake / stir and when to change the heat intensity. The whole process of preparing a dish (from selecting the recipe to plating the end product) takes a couple of minutes and ends with the customer grading your work. Rinse and repeat the next day, with a new NPC.
The way the game flows is similar to going to a friendly therapist, with various characters sharing their troubles and inquiring for advice on how to solve them. Rootsworth is no therapist though, and all the healing he does is through his dishes, which seem to greatly satisfy the troubled mice of the Lilygrove community. The dialogues have a lot of flavor, some of them being written in this specific Rootsworth mice-talk, akin to pirate slang. They’re fun to read, but sadly there are no voice-overs.
The game is really easy to pick up (so are the minigames for preparing the ingredients) and the controls are responsive. Before choosing what recipe to cook, you can see the character’s likes and dislikes, and also the ingredients you are missing from your pantry. These can be acquired on the spot from a merchant. It’s a bit underwhelming that no matter how simple or complex the recipe (or its preparation) is, you get pretty much the same amount of coins as a reward, regardless there is always enough money to get all the ingredients you need for any kind of recipe. What I would like to see as a QoL feature though is for the recipes that match the preferences of a certain character to be highlighted in some way. Right now, for each character, you have to scroll through ~30 different recipes to see what fits and what doesn’t.
The Lost Legends of Redwall: Feasts & Friends is a short, cozy and easy game that will appeal to fans of the Redwall universe (as you can see its characters as Rootsworth’s customers) and others alike. It took me around two and a half hours to reach the end of the game. Sadly, there are no Steam achievements implemented, but I would gladly replay it if these are ever added. Since the customers are scripted (and not random), you can’t continue preparing dishes after you finish the game – for that, you would need to start all over, thus the replayability factor is somewhat limited.
