Stardew Valley meets Slay the Spire in 2026’s best cozy game

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Random Select is Polygon's column about under-the-radar video games. Our editors assign a writer to check out a game at random, downloading the game without knowing beforehand what it is. The catch? They have to play for at least an hour and report on their thoughts — honestly. This week's game is Beastro.

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It’s 4:45 a.m. on a Tuesday. I don’t want to be conscious at 4:45 a.m. on a Tuesday. I didn't forget to study for an AP Spanish exam, brain, I am a grown man!!!!!! And yet here I am, awake, in a cold sweat, and faced with a decision: Do I curl up in hopes of falling asleep again but risk not waking up early enough to get my family together for the day, or do I catapult into the ice-bath that is my daily To Do list and succumb to burnout in the early afternoon? Ugh, 4:45 a.m. on a Tuesday.

I realize — but barely, because it’s 4:45 a.m. on a Tuesday — I have a third option. In a daze, I tiptoe downstairs, flatten back out on the couch, and power up the Xbox. Waiting for me is the perfect “cozy game” for the liminal headspace my circumstance requires: Beastro, the culinary genre-bending indie game from Timberline Studio.

This is not shade at Beastro but… kinda sorta shade at the entire cozy genre. I’m not against chill vibes — I just rarely look to games for a cool-down experience. I play to be challenged, not recreate work I could or should be doing IRL, so there go most farming sims. I also either need a deep, coherent narrative to cling to, or want a game to drive me over the cliff of experimental play mechanics. Atmospheric games where you only collect fluffy little guys to spa piano music generally fall between the poles of my taste. I might be the only cat person in history who can’t with cozy games, which makes me sad.

Timberline is right to call Beastro “cozy” based on what people look for out of the label. Yet there’s a world outside of this column in which I did not give it a chance based on the classification alone, which stinks for Alternate Universe me, who devoured what the studio has served up. The beauty of Beatstro is that Timberline, much like its playable sous chef hero Panko, has crafted a delectably eclectic yet balanced game — part RPG, part farm sim, part card-builder, part WarioWare-style mini-game package, all connected by story that basically substitutes the elemental powers of Avatar: The Last Airbender for flavor profiles. One minute you go fishing for the catch of the day, the next you’ll be cooking up a feast a la Sizzling Stakes from Mario Party, and then it’s off to battle Umami monsters with Salty magic. It’s the perfect challenge for 4:45 a.m. on a Tuesday or whenever your brain needs a little pick me up.

As Panko, you awaken one morning in the bubbly town of Palo Pori to discover your mentor missing and the arrival of a fire spirit outsider. To rescue him — and address the darker magics on the precipice of invading Palo Pori — it’s up to Panko to serve up dinner at the town’s only restaurant and supply Caretakers, defenders who roam the lands outside the walls, with the flavor powers they need to take on incoming foes.

There are three phases to every turn/day in Beastro. When Panko wakes up, it’s time to harvest from the garden, feed the livestock to produce eggs and meat, harvest bugs and plants from around Palo Pori, and fish for more proteins. Rendered as a 3D world full of bright colors and quirky characters, Palo Pori is a dense enough environment that, while technically you’re trapped in for the entirety of the game — Panko only feeds the fighters — it never feels suffocating. Limited supplies and farm space give players enough to chew on without breaking a sweat; you can’t really screw up at this stage. Cozy!

The next stage finds Panko opening the restaurant for that evening’s supper rush, a foundation on which Timberline expertly builds cooking mini games, a Dave the Diver-like management course without too high of stakes, and a puzzle in which you build a meal for a selected hero that will eventually translate into the deck-building game in part 3. Sound overstuffed? It’s all elegant thanks to [chef’s kiss] mise en place. Chopping, sauteeing, and boiling on cue earns XP to unlock the recipe skill tree, while cooking the hero’s meal requires fitting blended or contrasting flavors around a grid in order to maximize hit points and attack strategy. After a few rounds, I eagerly looked forward to cooking up a meal that would fill up that night’s fighter with the proper balanced diet required to do battle with Sweet monsters or a boss with a surprise Spicy spell in its pocket.

In phase 3, Panko closes up shop and retires to Palo Pori’s after-hours lounge, where a champion sits by the fire to tell the tale of that day’s expedition. Presented as a flashback in a paper-puppet-inspired art style, Beastro suddenly becomes a roguelite deckbuilder in which you fight bosses, pick up new supplies you can only find outside Palo Pori’s walls, and traverse a board of different flavor-themed lands. How you do is all about how you stacked your deck in the cooking challenges.

The trick-taking battles in Beastro combine number-crunching and flavor enhancements. Every card belongs to one of the five wieldable tastes (Umami, Sour, Sweet, Bitter, and Salty), with some juicing each other and others designed to undercut. Every ingredient you cooked with previously becomes a card of a certain number-level, meaning the highest-quality dish isn't always the smartest play. If you're running Oyshi, the defense-heavy Umami Caretaker, feeding him Umami and Sour gives you ammo to ramp up attacks later on, while Bitter could easily nerf those cards (but can also be the perfect dense to Umami monsters).

The experience is both elegant and prone to frustration — it took me a few rounds of exploration to know exactly what I might be facing in order to correctly balance my deck for survival. Going all-in on one flavor eventually runs into enemies designed to counter it, while trying to cram every flavor onto the plate leaves you with the culinary equivalent of a jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none buffet. Added card bonuses and requests from the hero (“No fish, please!”) all phases of the gameplay.

Slathered in sweetness and peppered with snappy dialogue, Timberline has really delivered the ideal cozy game for me, someone who most of the time does not actually want to play a cozy game. Beastro might look shallow next to a full-fledged RPG and overly complex for the seasoned cozy gamer. To me, the whole thing simply went down easy — brain dead at 4:45 a.m. on a Tuesday or even wide-awake in the late afternoon.