The Lost Legends of Redwall: Feast & Friends Review: Cooking at Its Finest?

Ever thought about what it takes to prepare in-game meals at a camp? The Lost Legends of Redwall: Feast & Friends gives you the chance to do just that. While you aren’t at a camp and instead are cooking at a house, you prepare simple meals with elegance. That’s the hope at least, because the cooking preparations are unlike anything resembling modern cooking. But it works by simplifying the process and making the steps easy to follow.

Your cooking requests are easy and it’s difficult to make mistakes, unlike other games in the genre. There’s always room to improve and you gain more advantages to make your dishes better. Unfortunately, the tutorial can’t be seen again and you have no options to practice. That means you cut into your ability to make money and can put yourself in a horrible situation. The simplicity helps but you must be willing to restart and try again for the lessons to sink in.

The Lost Legends of Redwall: Feast & Friends is available on PC for 3.99 USD.

Story – The Road to Being a Better Chef

You start as the chef from The Lost Legends of Redwall: The Scout Anthology and the story is about you. Friends and strangers alike knock on your door, asking you to cook something up for them. Their requests don’t necessarily become more complex but you must learn to cook with new ingredients and spices. Along the way, you learn how to cook more recipes and can even create your own.

The story progresses as you cook for characters familiar to those who follow the Redwall series. Similar to games such as Cuisineer, it’s not a game where failure is around the corner. It’s easy to come up with dishes to progress the story and there’s always a way out. The story progresses as you cook more, and even failures are minor setbacks. You can’t derail the story which is nice for beginners.

People ask you to cook for them and you make something.

There’s nothing extraordinary about the story; you build your skills as a chef and slowly gain recognition. But it’s easy to follow and you don’t need much knowledge about the Redwall series. It’s more important that you learn how to cook because that’s what you spend most of your time on. The cooking gameplay is simultaneously the game’s strongest and shakiest aspect.

Gameplay – Following Recipes With Simple Cooking

Unlike cooking games such as Chef Life: A Restaurant Simulator, you aren’t fighting your way to the top of the restaurant business. You are a chef who is helping out a small town, creating wonderful dishes to satiate them. This is reflected in the food you create; it’s simple yet tasty fare appreciated by everyone who visits.

Even though the guests you cook for get progressively pickier, none of it is to the level of food critics. It’s simply knowing that there are ingredients they don’t like, and working with what you have. At the end of the day, your guests will eat your food and have a decent experience. Whether you can improve on it is the core part of the game.

Choose what someone asks you to make, then see if you can make it.

The quality of your dishes is determined by the ingredient preparation and the cooking process. How you prepare the ingredients is just as important as the ingredients you choose. Following the cooking process as much as you can has a big impact on the final result as well. Balancing the two is difficult but rewarding when you finally get it right. Unfortunately, getting it right is an exercise in frustration.

Tutorials – Fast & Fleeting

It’s easy to view a tutorial to learn how something works in the beginning. But once you are done viewing it, you can’t easily go back for a refresher. You are thrown into the deep end and must figure out how everything works, hoping you memorised everything. Reviewing a tutorial isn’t impossible, but you can’t shift pages and are stuck at the end.

Ingredient preparation runs on points and the more you get, the better the final dish. But it’s easy to miss what you must do or what proper alignment looks like. There’s no method to test and you must work with what you have. While failing a dish is not easy, getting a perfect dish is equally hard. Unless you took photos, you have nothing to go back to.

What you see is all you get for help.

This also happens with the actual cooking process. You learn how to make dishes sweeter or spicier, but you don’t know what that does. How much is too much? How do you know a character will request the use of spices? This information isn’t easy to reference, making it easy to mess up a dish.

That doesn’t mean you won’t eventually get the hang of cooking. But the game’s difficulty feels artificially inflated because you can’t practice or review. By the time you learn how to cook or get comfortable with the concepts, things change. It would be nice if the pace was slower or tutorials were easy to reference to avoid unnecessary frustration.

Audio & Visual – Ready to Serve?

Unlike The Lost Legends of Redwall: The Scout Anthology which has voice acting, this game is largely silent. Most of the audio you hear comes from cooking and the evaluation. Additional sound effects come from other activities but it’s mostly a silent game. It works in the game’s favour but it would have been nice to hear some voices.

The visuals are hit-and-miss. Redwall characters and ingredient appearances are well done. But your eventual food creations look like cubes rather than appetizing meals. Putting them together and cooking them doesn’t seem to help. Even arranging the plate is rather limited. While the appearance of the food doesn’t affect your ultimate score, it is weird to see food served like this.

The Lost Legends of Redwall: Feast & Friends was reviewed on Steam with a code provided by Forthright Entertainment.