Cassette Beasts review – the brilliance of Pokémon all grown up
Have you ever had a song that didn’t click for you until you heard a remix? For me it’s the Glitch Mob remix of Seven Nation Army by The White Stripes. I like the original well enough, but something about that version just hits right. Feel free to blast my terrible taste in music in the comments! It’s not just the slightly hammy music analogy that makes me think about Cassette Beasts as a remix. Its similarities to Pokémon are far too blatant to just slot it into a broad monster battler genre, yet there’s still enough that’s new and fresh and different to make it more than a mere cover or tribute. And while I like Pokémon, I love Cassette Beasts.
Cassette Beasts reviewDeveloper: Bytten StudioPublisher: Raw FuryPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out now on PC (Steam, Windows), PC Game Pass, out May 25th on Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S (Xbox Game Pass)
The game starts with you deposited unceremoniously on New Wirral, a mysterious Arthurian isle unshackled from both time and any particular version of our reality. New Wirral’s human inhabitants arrived from different times and versions of Earth, with the first reaching its shores a little over a century before the game’s present. They swiftly discovered that they were not the only living creatures on the island, with dozens of different monsters roaming its environs. Some time before your arrival, it was discovered that these monsters could be recorded onto regular old cassette tapes which would allow the bearer to transform into them. Pretty good setup for some monster battling, eh?
The Pokémon influences are displayed front and centre. The game’s charming visuals are the most obvious example, with sprites that look like they were ripped from Red & Blue and given a fresh lick of 2023 paint. Start a battle and you’ll see that the core game elements are present and correct. You have a team of up to six monsters that can level up and evolve into different forms. Battles are turn based with each turn allowing you to use one of a monster’s moves or an item. There are different elemental types with varying strengths and weaknesses when pit against each other. Heck, you even have to find and battle a number of gym lead… sorry, ranger captains, and collect their stamps of approval on a little card.
What makes Cassette Beasts great is that while it draws on much of Pokémon’s existing template, it’s not beholden to it either. You’re almost always fighting alongside a partner who draws from the same team of six you do, so you immediately have a broader range of strategies available. Type advantages and disadvantages do more than just make attacks stronger and weaker, the interaction of different elements can bestow status effects and even temporarily change the target’s type. My favourite has to be using fire attacks against a plastic type. The first attack will melt the plastic, turning it to poison, which it turns out is highly flammable, so further fire attacks will ignite the poison, causing the burn status to be applied. Helpfully, the first few times you see a particular interaction, a pop-up will explain the logic behind it, which I found made it a lot easier to remember, though you can check the type chart in your inventory at any time.
