Monster Meals | Steam Deck Review

Restaurant simulation games aren’t anything new. I feel confident in saying that we all have played games like Overcooked! or even Diner Dash. If you haven’t, I have a hard time believing you. But I’ll give you the basics. You manage a restaurant’s day-to-day business, which may or may not include cooking meals for guests, adding to your menu, washing dishes, and even taking out the trash. You usually do so with increasingly impatient customers demanding more and more complex meals.

When developer Giant Warrior Studio contacted me to ask if I could review their latest game, Monster Meals, I have to admit that I was a bit apprehensive. Thankfully, there’s enough fresh ideas to set this title apart on its own. It doesn’t break the mold by any stretch of the imagination, but it makes for a fun little “weekend” play-through. And we certainly love those types of games here at The GO.

The Party Had Just Begun

In Monster Meals, you play a monster chef, whose customers are…you guessed it…monsters. You’ll acquire ingredients, chop them up, fry them up, put them on a plate, and serve them to the appropriate customer. If all of this sounds familiar, it should. There are three key factors that make this title unique.

First off, you’re serving meals from a food truck. This doesn’t affect gameplay a great deal, but I found it a fun change of pace. The second huge change is how you acquire your ingredients. Since you’re serving monsters, your menu includes protein from buzzards, fish, scorpions, and even rats. You find the latter by digging in the trash outside your food truck and smacking them over the head before bringing their carcass inside for preparation. In later levels, you’ll have to throw your weapon in the air to take out birds and gather fish from underground. It’s a unique take on food sims, and it adds an extra layer of depth to make things complex.

The final difference is a rather humorous one. If you fail to get a customer’s order delivered to them in time, they give up and look for their own meal. Unfortunately, that meal is you. Yes, the monster eats you, promptly pukes you up, and destroys the table where he was sitting. This is obviously not a good thing for you, as it takes up valuable time and scares off a potential customer. This can be mitigated, however, by serving your guest an appetizer of swarming flies. Yum.

Just when you think you’ve seen everything, the game keeps throwing more at you. You might have to bake a bird in the oven or add two different types of condiments to your plate. The further you go, the more complex the orders get. But it’s all very clever and easy to understand what you’re supposed to do. It just gets very frenetic very quickly.

 

The Hit of the Land

This is an indie game with a lot of love put behind it. The graphics are cute, but vibrant in a very playful way. There’s never any question what you’re supposed to do at any given time. The only reason you’ll get stuck is if your reflexes aren’t quick enough.

The game is mechanically sound. Everything works the way in which you expect it to. To make matters even better, I played this on my Steam Deck, and it’s perfectly suited for that platform. The only issue I had was a very minor bug that the developer immediately squashed as soon as they heard about it. If that’s not telling of a dedicated dev, I don’t know what is.

Monster Meals also offers some upgrades on which to spend your hard-earned cash. These consist of hats, weapons, and styles of food trucks. They don’t affect the gameplay at all, so nothing will make your job any easier. But you can look cool cooking food while wearing a football helmet.

The final aspect I feel I should mention, despite not experiencing it myself. You can play this game cooperatively with a friend; I just didn’t have the opportunity. This would be a huge plus, however, as some of the later stages are very tricky to handle on your own. If you get a chance to play it, I highly recommend playing with a friend, especially if you want to get three stars on each level.

Monster Meals Final Verdict

Monster Meals may not be the very first food prep game I’d recommend, but it’s still worthy of your time. You can’t beat the price, as its charm and challenge will keep you coming back for more. Although I’d like to see more interesting ways to spend money, I can’t argue that it’s not necessary. It’s simply not that kind of game. I also think the difficulty ramps up a bit too quickly. I think I would have preferred more levels that only slightly increase the challenge. I would have been better equipped for the later stages, I believe. Even still, it shouldn’t take you more than four hours to work through this one, and the price is definitely easy to swallow.

To hear me talk more about Monster Meals, be sure to listen to our January 16th, 2025 episode of The Gaming Outsider Podcast around the 48:29 time stamp.

This review is based on a Steam copy of Monster Meals provided by Giant Warrior Studio for coverage purposes. As of the time of this writing, it is exclusive to this platform.