Cassette Beasts is a game made for me. First of all, I love Pokemon (totally unique, right?), which Cassette Beasts lovingly riffs off. Secondly, I’ve been asking for a return to 2D Pokemon games for ages. Thirdly, I grew up on the mythical Wirral peninsula, which the game’s region New Wirral is clearly named after thanks to the developers’ similar heritage. There’s more connections, but all you need to know is that this is a game made for me.

You land on New Wirral confused. Washed up on a beach you don’t recognise in a world you’ve never even heard of, there are monsters you catch with cassette tapes and a demonic creature who goes by the name Morgante makes your whole reality shiver and static. She’s an Archangel, you later find out, and defeating them might be your only route home. A friendly face offers you a classic choice – your first cassette beast. There are only two to choose from as opposed to the usual three, and I picked the ghosty sheep. Spooky or sweet, the game asks. There’s only one choice for me.

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You soon head to Harbortown, which will be your base of operations. Here you can listen out for rumours, heal your team, and have a natter with companions you collect like Gym Badges on your adventure. The companions are interesting and well-written considering the only times they talk are when you do their specific quest and sit down at a Dark Souls-esque bonfire to rest and heal. Leveling up your friendship with them after you’ve completed their respective quests is significantly less interesting, however, appearing to only progress through conversations at campfires again. I expected more companion-specific quests together, not just a cutscene-date with a couple of two-option choices, and it’s a shame this aspect of the game wasn’t explored further.

The quests your companions do take you on are hit and miss. I’ll detail the basics of the early ones: there's a quest to beat all the Ranger Captains, and Kayleigh, who wants to face old demons in the form of a cult leader who has established a camp on the island. Without spoiling anything, the Captains are just easier versions of Pokemon’s Gym Leaders, and seem to have been added because it’s the thing to do in these kinds of games. Searching for leaders is dull and battling them is tame, so I could have done without this Pokemon reference in lieu of more monstrous foes like the Archangels, who I’ll come onto later.

As for Kayleigh, her quest is far more personal. She’s escaped this cult’s clutches once before, but is determined to head back to right some wrongs. The added narrative weight made this much more engaging, and there’s still a boss fight at the end for all of you battlers out there. There are four other companions to find, each with their own tales (or tails) to tell, and the quality of their quests varies.

The same goes for the game’s puzzles. You have to complete puzzles using rocks, statues, or your ever-growing list of abilities to unlock underground train stations that act as fast travel points across New Wirral’s open world. There are also other puzzles dotted about to unlock various chests, routes, or bosses, and the quality of these varies as much as the companion quests. Some are far too easy, and others are nearly impossible to spot, let alone complete. Sometimes I wondered if it was a personal issue – I missed chests in corners and doors in shadows on multiple occasions that offered simple solutions to puzzles I had spent dozens of minutes fussing over – but another player at TheGamer ran into similar issues on the same puzzles, so either it’s both of us or it’s the game.

The best thing about Cassette Beasts is the battle system. Most games rip straight from Pokemon. Fire beats Grass, so double damage. Electric beats Water, obviously. Cassette Beasts thinks about how those elements would actually react to one another in the real world, and applies effects accordingly. Use a Flame-type move on a Plant-type beast? It will create an updraft, setting up a Substitute-esque wall of wind in front of your opponent. Using a Flame-type on a Plastic-type (oh yeah) will change it to a Poison-type, because it’s molten sludge now. Fire is not very effective on Ground? Not here, it superheats it to form a Glass-type, a rare affliction that means you can shatter your opponent and instantly knock them out.

There’s a steep learning curve here, but the double battles have so much depth because of the robust system. Using a move on your own ally may suddenly be a great strategy in some circumstances, and if all else fails, you can always fuse together into a mighty morphing beasty ranger. This powerful technique has a cooldown, so use it wisely in the toughest battles against Ranger Captains, Archangels, or the Rogue Fusions you come across.

Speaking of tough battles, the Archangels are the exact opposite of the Ranger Captains. Narratively important and aesthetically interesting, the battles are tough cookies. Archangels don’t have a type, so throw all that type chart stuff you learned out the window and just hit it hard. If an Archangel maxes out its action points (AP, which you spend to use moves), it can unleash a devastatingly powerful attack that will nearly always knock you out. I lost to the early Archangels on many occasions, and only succeeded past the first two when I was ten or 20 levels overleveled. However, after that, things got easier, and I breezed past the final few despite being underleveled. The difficulty curve of the game could use some work, as falling at those early bosses so often could easily turn people away from a fun game.

Monster designs are hugely important to the success of any monster catching franchise, and I generally like Cassette Beasts’ offerings. Many of them are humanoid, lots puns, and a couple references to northwestern slang. My team consisted of my ghosty sheep – whom at one point had a convergent evolution where I had to choose between two vague notions to dictate their evolution path – a plastic toy Robin Hood robot, a dinosaur with a gatling gun in its belly, an angel based on a kid’s cartoon scribbles, a sea-Medusa, and a changeable final slot wherein I had a living bush, anthropomorphic stained glass window, and a child with a TV for a head on a rotating basis.

While I like the designs, I’m less fond of the fusions. Some are bespoke creations, according to developer Bitten Studio, but others are AI generated. I don’t expect the devs to hand craft the 14,000 possible fusions, but most of the results are disappointing.

There are hundreds of tweaks to the Pokemon formula that make Cassette Beasts great. You can activate Nuzlocke mode in-game (only before starting a new save, though). You can toggle both opponent levels and AI on a scale at any point, increasing the challenge as far as an “impenetrable grind” against “literally Skynet” if you so wish, or dialling both to the opposite end. These little things add up, and when you apply them to a beautiful 2D world that you can explore however you want, it makes for great fun.

I had a great time with Cassette Beasts, but it was undeniably frustrating in places. It iterates on the Pokemon formula in nearly every possible way, and exploring the world via companion quests rather than just doing a big circle on your Gym challenge creates a wonderful sense of adventure. Cassette Beasts tries a lot of new things and most of them are successful. The story is compelling, the characters are engaging, and the battle system is one of the best I’ve ever used. It doesn’t pull everything off, but I’d much rather play a game that takes risks, rather than one that rehashes the same old formula time and time again.

Score: 3.5/5. A code was provided to the game by the publisher.

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