The Lost Legends of Redwall: Feasts & Friends Review

The Lost Legends of Redwall: Feasts & Friends is a cooking simulator based on the Redwall book series. This game was originally for iOS, released back in 2021 and ported onto Steam. I don’t exactly love the idea of playing a mobile game on my PC, but considering I only have Android, this was the only way I was ever going to play this game.

...These are just fried potatos.

You play as Scout-Chef Rootsworth as he cooks up dishes for the cast of characters featured in Redwall and even competes in a town cook-off. And… that’s pretty much it. The story isn’t exactly high stakes or anything, it’s more cosy and light-hearted. As someone who has never read the books (or even knew they existed), it’s more like a short story spin-off. It’s nice, and I liked the dialogue, but there isn’t much to bite on. I’m sure fans of the books would love the interactions and the expansion to the Redwall lore.

But enough of that, let’s get cooking. Every day, you’ll have a customer with their own likes and dislikes of certain ingredients, so you better choose a recipe that fits their preferences. You’ll also need to make sure you have all the ingredients in your inventory first, which can either be bought from the merchant or have scouts find them for you for free; however, that takes real-time for them to return… or it would seem. As it turns out, cooking automatically skips the timer. No need to wait an hour every time you need ingredients when you’re short on cash. And let me tell you, you will rarely be short on money.

You like cutting? Because you're gonna be doing that a lot.

Anyways, time to cook. You’ll first need to prepare all the necessary ingredients, from slicing and dicing to peeling and… nope, that’s pretty much all the different preparations. Each type has its own mini-game, which challenges your ability to time your clicks and cut accurately. Once you’ve done all that, you move on to cooking everything, which replicates a Cooking Mama mini-game where you do actions like adjusting the heat and adding ingredients at the right time. You’ll also need to add salt and other spices on your own to ensure your dish tastes as perfect as it should. It’s actually the most challenging part of the game, as you need to keep focused on several progress bars to get the best rank.

Oh, right. Once you serve your dish, the customer will rank your performance. Finishing your dish just amounts to dumping all the ingredients onto a plate, no real options to clean it up or make it look a little better. This is also where the physics tend to wig out the most, as I’ve had diced tomatoes and sliced fish fly off in random directions. Also, when I was checking out the Steam page, it said “hand-crafted recipes” in its description, which I sort of expected to be about having actual recipes you might want to try out. Nope, it’s more like chopping stuff up, heating it up and serving. Rinse and repeat until you finish the story.

Um... can food float on plates like that?

The game is not long at all, by the way. I beat it in less than two and a half hours, and I could’ve gone faster if I hadn't spent so much time sorting through the list of recipes looking for the right one. It doesn’t even let you have a complete save file or a sandbox mode, it simply sends you back to the title screen, waiting for a complete new game. That’s not cool.

I should talk about some of the other issues I encountered in my playthrough, such as when I exited the game and came back in (mostly because I wanted to see if I could cheat the clock), it did all of the tutorial prompts. It won’t save anything, as far as I’m aware, except your story progress, which kinda sucks. It doesn’t even turn off the exit pop-up that links to all the social media for Redwall despite checking the box. Also, during a scene after the meal, I think there was supposed to be a different character portrait, but because there are never more than two characters interacting with each other at once, I don’t think that was even programmed in. There are also quite a few misspellings and typos in the dialogue. They couldn’t have fixed that before?

All these issues aren’t game breaking or make the game any less fun, but I sort of expected better for a game that’s already three years old at this point! There is a roadmap, which includes freeplay and more ways to cook, but man does it feel like they just made the base gameplay and then are developing the rest of the game later. It’s a small game, so you shouldn’t expect the world from it, but some features should be at release.

This is me trying to be fancy with it.

However, do not say I disliked The Lost Legends of Redwall: Feasts & Friends. It’s a nice and cosy time for cheap that I can’t bring myself to hate. I just expected a little more because I have played games with much more content and at a lower price than what was offered at the time of review (then again, I did get Dead Space 2 for literal cents…).