Cassette Beasts is more than just indie Pokemon
Towards the tail end of August Nintendo made four games available to Switch Online subscribers for a week as a part of their ongoing Game Trials. Three of these games I had ample experience with; Tetris Effect I've played on PS4 and on the Quest 2, PowerWash Simulator I've recently been working through on the Quest 2, and Enter the Gungeon has been sitting in my Steam library for longer than I can remember. The last game was something of an anomaly for me, sitting comfortably on that list of things I really should look at at some point. That week came and went and I didn't pick up my Switch at all, but a friend of mine did. And since then there has been a single game he would not stop talking about: Cassette Beasts, the fourth of the Game Trials that he happened to get stuck into.
I shrugged him off at first saying I'd get to it eventually, but last week I figured I'd finally give it a look on Steam. It was discounted. A divine sign if I'd ever seen one. The game was sold to me as an encapsulation of everything I loved about Pokemon randomisers, shoved into a game with some really fun mechanics. Just over a week, 40 hours of gameplay, and 100% of achievements unlocked, I can safely say it's so much more than that.
Welcome to New Wirral
The game starts out pretty tame. You create and name your character in a void of whirring lights and unceremoniously find yourself dumped on a beach. Before reaching the game’s primary hub you’re ambushed by a strange crab with a traffic cone on its head, and it’s here you get a first taste of what the game has to offer. The core of Cassette Beasts sees you encountering strange monsters and, where you feel like it, recording them using your cassette player. With these recordings you’re able to transform into the monsters and use their abilities in battle. It’s a really unique and surprisingly deep system, but I’ll talk about that in more detail later. Through your first encounter with the aptly named Traffikrab you meet Kayleigh, a resident of New Wirral, who sets you up with your very own cassette player, along with a choice between spooky and sweet for your first beast. From here you get a few more tutorials as well as a bit more of an explanation of the world you now find yourself in. New Wirral is an island people have been falling into for years with no apparent way back to where they came from. It’s a space that’s surely somewhere, that its inhabitants have had to come to terms with occupying.
Your larger goal for the game is quickly established as the relatively closed-off tutorial segment comes to a close and you encounter your first Archangel. Where your characters and beasts are 2D sprites layered on top of a simple (but good-looking) 3D world, the Archangels are eerily out of place with unique and inconsistent designs. These usually utilise 3D models that look entirely out of place, which is a large part of their identity as mysterious and powerful beings. After beating the first Archangel Morgante, you learn that there may yet be a way off the island, and it’s in these Archangel encounters you might just find your answer. As you progress you get more and more clues, and something I find really special is the fact that you can actually piece together the clues you have at any point in the game. If you do beat everything the game will spell out where to go quite explicitly, but I really do appreciate the player having the freedom to go to the finale early. And you really will be relying on your own puzzle solving, with the riddle to solve being unique to your playthrough. It comes together for a genuinely compelling experience that will vary from person to person. Once the initial tutorial segment is out of the way, you really are just free to do as you please.
Of Quests and Side Quests
Your time in New Wirral will always be spent with a partner. As mentioned before this starts out with the Irish lady Kayleigh, with you finding more as you explore and interact with the various inhabitants of the island. Each partner comes with their own often-short main quest that gives you a little time to get to know them, while also supporting your larger goal of leaving the island. I really enjoyed taking the time to experience these quests and getting to know more about each of the game’s six partners; it’s worth noting that while you are forced to use certain partners for their specific quests, that you are free to pick your favourite and run with them for the vast majority of the game. This is rewarded to an extent too, with each partner having a relationship level that both helps you in battle at higher levels, and also provides you with short scenes of them opening up. I personally stuck with Kayleigh for the majority of the game, though there was one more that had a surprisingly moving story for how few words were said.
I stuck with Keyleigh right to the end, my final team of three was pretty unstoppable!
Beyond your partners, the game throws a bunch of other content at you if you happen to find yourself struggling for direction. These are often presented to you as rumours around town, and I really can’t fault this system. At no point in the story did I feel lost or without aim thanks to the fact that I just talked to people with a bubble above their head whenever I saw it. This adds their rumour to your quest log, and allows easy tracking for whatever they’ve told you. Beyond directing you to points of interest for the main quests, these rumours also provide you with hints for finding monsters you’re missing for your Beastiary, or even where you might be able to find a new ability to further open up the world. These hints aren’t given to you in any particular order, making them really just feel like rumours going around in-game, and again personalising the larger adventure in a surprisingly meaningful way.
Out and About
Navigating the world is something I initially did not enjoy at all. Starting out the game is slow, and features something I really dislike in limiting your movement to be eight-directional instead of analogue. This does change though (at least the slow part), steadily improving as you progress. As you record one of a few set beasts, you’ll gain new skills. This starts out with a gliding ability; after all, what open world game is complete with one since Breath of the Wild? From there though you get something that is genuinely impactful: a powerful flaming dash. Removed from Zelda references, this dash not only gives you a really nice movement option, but also serves to break large blocks that might be in your way throughout the world. A bombable wall? No thanks, I’ll smash my head right through it thank you!
Though you are still limited by stamina throughout, this gradual opening up of the world is well-implemented. The way it usually went for me is that I would explore with what I had, work through whatever quests seemed interesting, and around the time I was feeling like something a little fresh, a rumour would pop up. There always seemed to be a new ability on the horizon just as I felt I was starting to have seen everything, and it’s something that I was really impressed by. If you happened to just be recording everything you see, you really could get by without these hints at all though, and that seems just as special an experience. The game never really pushes you in any one direction, but does a fantastic job of keeping you on track with subtle nudges and, should you want them, more explicit pointers. I never felt like I was wasting my time by exploring in a given direction. It’s rare to come across a world that felt so worthwhile to just wander through, but Cassette Beasts really nailed it for me.
A Surprisingly Deep Combat System
Let’s get stuck into the combat system next, because there’s a surprising amount to unpack here. At its core we have a turn-based system that is usually 2v2, but can sometimes be expanded to three members on a given side for special occasions. In battle you find yourself directly controlling both your player character and the partner you’ve got tagging along with you, with each character transforming into their chosen beasts, as opposed to standing on the sidelines giving them orders. This approach has some cool quirks, most notably that both your characters and the beasts you transform into have health bars of their own. If you’re fighting another human and manage to deal enough damage to break their transformation, you can use the remainder of the turn to just attack their defenceless self. If you manage to deplete a character’s health bar, that’s that! The battle ends, even if they have more beasts in the back. Some later battles do have measures in place that makes the opposing characters invulnerable, forcing you through the full fight, but I was happy to see just how many could be overpowered this way.
Looking at the beasts themselves, each one has stats that are combined with the character who’s transforming into them’s stats for a final total. These are all fairly obvious in how they function, with health determining how many hits they can take, speed defining the turn order, and melee and ranged attack and defence speaking for themselves. Outside of the stats using your human character’s for the final calculation, this probably sounds fairly by the books, and that’s not a bad thing. By making use of familiar fundamentals the game is able to really go all in with extras without it feeling overwhelming to you as the player.
Your 2v2 battles do also house something a little more in the form of fusions. As you take damage in battle, your fusion gauge increases, and when it’s full, both characters can choose to fuse in their current monster forms for a unique and more powerful species. The fusion lasts either for the remainder of the battle, or until your opponent manages to drain its HP. This mechanic feels a little unbalanced, and maybe a little underutilised in the larger context of the game, usually existing as the finale to a strong opponent or as the basis of a more challenging fight in the wild. I can appreciate them as they are now though, and I do like that the charging time for them is actually quite hefty. You’re really encouraged to hold onto your fusion and pull it out as a trump card instead of just overpowering every fight. It works, but I might have preferred something where the fusion is slightly less powerful, but more accessible in normal combat.
There's a huge amount of variety in the stickers available.
Attacks are applied to each of your monster’s tapes using stickers, which might be a nostalgic thought to those of you who perhaps grew up with cassette tapes and enjoyed making them your own. Each sticker relates to one ability or attack, with each tape having a set number of slots to occupy. This starts out at just four or five, and grows to eight when the tape is fully-levelled. What makes the stickers so interesting is that you can remove and reapply them completely at a whim, transplanting them across tapes where compatibility allows. You’re never forced to stick with a bad choice, allowing for a real sense of creativity and experimentation that I seldom find in other games. This is heavily supported by the degree of interactivity in the attack and monster types, as well as the ability to “remaster” a number of your tapes once they’ve reached their full potential. You can think of this as the game’s take on more typical evolutions, with some of them even varying depending on the stickers you have attached.
Cassette Beasts features 14 elemental types: Beast, Air, Astral, Earth, Fire, Ice, Lightning, Metal, Plant, Plastic, Poison, Water, Grass, and Glitter. Every one of these types hits every other type for the same amount of damage, meaning you’re never truly locked out of winning a fight, even with an unoptimal team. Where you might get caught out however is in accidentally providing a buff to your opponent if you’ve not seen how one type interacts with another before. This is a really interesting system, with some interactions buffing, some debuffing, and others temporarily transmuting to change a monster’s type for a few turns. While there’s a lot to remember, a lot of it does come down to common sense. A Fire attack against an Air type target creates an updraft, an Ice attack against a Water type target will change their type to Ice by freezing them, a Plastic attack on a Fire type target releases black smoke that boosts their evasion. It’s all really quite intuitive, with a type chart being accessible in-game alongside short tutorial prompts to explain the interaction the first time you see it. You can even make use of these matchups to buff your partner by attacking them with a weak move if you’re really planning ahead.
There's a lot of information, but at least it's pretty easy to digest!
The elemental types are also used really nicely with rare encounters, dubbed Bootlegs. In Cassette Beasts, every species can be encountered in its normal form, or with a custom palette as a Bootleg. What makes these so interesting here though is the fact that each monster has 14 Bootlegs, one for each type. This actually makes the process of hunting for Bootlegs meaningful, with certain types matching up with certain movesets really nicely. On top of that, Bootlegs have a higher chance of rewarding you with better stickers, with both Uncommon and Rare stickers having bonus effects on top of their standard use.
You can easily find your Bootlegs in your Tape Storage!
Stickers can be acquired by either levelling up your tapes, with tapes going from zero to five stars, and then infinitely hitting five star again, or by buying them at stores that rotate their inventory per in game day. Through my time playing I never felt like I was penned into one way of playing, though as the game progressed I do admit I started to move away from creative planning and more towards perhaps cheap ways of ending a fight quickly. In some ways it’s neat that the game has capacity for such a variation in play style, but it does go onto highlight some larger issues.
Beyond the Credits
Once you’ve beaten the game, a few new things become available to you. I won’t go through everything as to avoid minor spoilers, but one area I do feel the need to talk about is the Ranger Noticeboard. It’s here you’ll find yourself visiting a lot in the post-game, with it giving you three random missions to fulfil at a time. On paper this is somewhat interesting, especially when these missions are guiding you towards other goals that you might be chasing if like me you’re going for all achievements. A character might want to see a specific monster that’s been levelled up to five stars, you might be tasked with clearing out a certain number of Rogue Fusions (raid-style fights against a wild fused encounter), or fighting the odd battle. The gameplay loop is certainly there, but it ultimately devolves into a seemingly-endless cycle of grinding without much in the way of satisfying feedback.
To progress on the Ranger Noticeboard you need to get a certain amount of Fused Material, these acquired from both beating Rogue Fusions and completing quests. This starts out fairly reasonable in terms of requirements, but by the end you’re expected to gather 100, 120, and then 150 of this material. And these aren’t cumulative values. You get one shard per Rogue Fusion defeated, and not much more per quest. This doesn’t really scale either outside of a few quests that need to be beaten on loop. By the end it felt like drawn out content for the sake of saying the game is X number of hours long, and it’s a shame to have my positive experiences sullied to an extent because I wanted to see all there was to see from the game. I beat the main story within around 20 hours, and it took another 20 hours to get through this repetition. It’s not terrible if you happen to be the kind of person who enjoys watching something on one monitor and chipping away at the game on another, but after the really enjoyable story and world exploration, I was left wishing this got the same kind of attention. Were I playing on a platform without achievements like the Switch, I would have put the game down much sooner, and that’s a shame for me. There needed to be one more thing that you’re actively working towards to actually justify the time spent. Some final gauntlet to say the time you spent had some meaning and for you to have as an active goal. That just isn’t here.
Multiplayer and Missed Opportunities
With multiplayer being added earlier this year, I had some real hope that this would make the post-game grind that bit more interesting. After all, if you’re hopping online with a friend and playing through the battles together, you’ll probably be having more fun. I was really surprised by just how seamless the multiplayer experience ended up being. I hopped online on Steam, and connected to my friend on the Switch with no issues at all. In Cassette Beasts the multiplayer sees you both inhabit the same world, with each player being visible to the other. I think up to eight people can join one world, though I only got the chance to try with two. When you’re in the same world you can trade, battle, and join Rogue Fusion fights together, with any recordings being given to both players at the end of the battle. On top of this, you also get a special currency your joint Rogue Fusion fights. Much like Fused Material this is drip fed to you one piece per battle, but your reward for collecting 20 is the ability to force a given battle to contain a Bootleg encounter.
This is a genuinely cool mechanic that incentivises social play really nicely. There is a catch though. You get this special currency in place of Fused Material, not on top of it. What did this mean for me? That multiplayer was just an additional grind that did nothing to actually help me progress in the post-game. Much like the post-game itself the multiplayer was nice to experience, but it really felt like there should have been something more there, even if it was just having parity with the offline play in terms of material gain. I can appreciate what’s on offer for its simplicity, and really have to commend them for even having cross-platform play without issues, but again I’m just crying for that one step more that the game didn’t take.
A Stellar Soundtrack
Beyond my slight disappointment in the post-game, I do want to circle back and finish on something of a high. Cassette Beasts has a great soundtrack, and it’s something I’ve enjoyed listening to throughout my time on New Wirral. There’s only so much you can say about the music of a game, but every track fits so well to the areas, to the themes of the game, and I just wanted somewhere to point that out. To me bad music will never ruin a game, but where it fits in as well as it does here, it does a magnificent job in enhancing the larger experience. If you’re into your more mellow video game music, it’s a soundtrack worth adding to your playlist.
A Game Worth Playing
I feel like I’ve perhaps sounded a little more negative than I originally wanted here, but I do want to stress that this is a fantastic game. The reality is that I sound negative because I’ve had a great time and I want more; a game leaving that kind of lasting impression is nothing if not worth a play, and for the £15 or so I paid I could recommend it in a heartbeat. Even disregarding the post-game content that I have such mixed feelings about, you have here a 20+ hour adventure in a great-looking world, complete with likeable characters and fantastic combat mechanics. If you’re a monster catching fan or can just appreciate a good RPG, I really do feel there’s something here. It’s one to play.
