Feastopia Is Both Adorable and Intimidating

In Feastopia, you’re tasked with constructing a city entirely for the purpose of producing food offerings to appease the insatiable appetite of your god. As this god grows in power, it changes shape and begins to make increasingly difficult demands for more complex varieties of food. This premise may sound Lovecraftian and slightly sinister, but worry not. You’re not feeding an unknowable Old One with the souls of the damned; instead, you’re feeding Swiss rolls, candy, and milk shakes to a bib-wearing baby divinity.

Developed by White Star Studio, Feastopia describes itself as a ‘rogue-lite culinary city builder." This is a simulation game with an incredibly cutesy art style, one that belies a surprisingly brutal difficulty level. There are a lot of variables that you’ll need to keep in mind to develop an efficient infrastructure for your city and ensure you’re preparing perfectly punctual meals for your pre-school aged patron.

Rogue-lite snack

You might be wondering what makes Feastopia a ‘rogue-lite’? Well, rather than spending your time gradually developing a single city, you’ll build up a series of them under increasingly difficult circumstances. After every attempt, you’ll unlock upgrades that make your next try a little bit easier.

You spend several hours on each level in Feastopia, about as long as you’d spend attempting to meet all of the objectives of a scenario in Rollercoaster Tycoon. You finish every level by crossing a certain threshold of points. These points are earned by keeping your citizens happy and ensuring that you always meet the demands of the hungry god napping away at the heart of your city.

As a progression system, this works nicely. Early on, you don’t require many points to pass each level, meaning that you’ll never need to cook up any cuisine that’s too complex, and you’ll have some wiggle room to learn and experiment with the game’s systems. The more you advance, though, the more strictly you’ll need to optimise your time and the resources you spend. As everything gets harder, you’ll need to begin approaching every new chapter with a plan in mind, because placing buildings down thoughtlessly will quickly result in a divine tantrum and a subsequent Game Over.

Currently, there’s no free build mode to let you construct and cook at your own pace, although White Star Studio has announced that this is a planned future feature.

Tantalising Tech Tree

Every time you break ground on a new city, you'll begin with just a small selection of available structures. Over time, you unlock blueprints that open up more buildings, and with them, options to prepare increasingly refined dishes. Tying Feastopia’s tech tree to increasingly advanced recipes makes your progress feel both intuitive and rewarding, as your chefs gradually hone their craft.

At first, you can only offer basic snacks grown on farms or produced from animals grazing at pastures. Your citizens will need to grin and bear it through the early game as they munch on a diet of onions and cucumbers. Those same onions can later be used to garnish a pizza, though, ensuring they stay relevant both in the early and the late game. Unlocking Italy’s signature dish in Feastopia is the capstone of hours of intensive effort and research. To get the cheese you’ll need for it, you first have to upgrade your pastures so they can accommodate cows, and then you need to build a stockyard where you can milk them. You’ll also need to grow grain, and then send it off to a mill to get flour to form the doughy base of the pizza that you’re dreaming of.

It’s very satisfying to scale up your goals as the game goes on, and to slam together different ingredients, sourced from a wide variety of sites across your city, to produce something new and fresh.

The blueprints system that unlocks new buildings is semi-randomised, so you can’t directly plot where your epicurean ambitions will take you. You’ll need to be adaptable and ready to cook something tasty with the cards that you’re dealt.

A difficult dish

While there’s definitely a clash between Feastopia’s adorable presentation and how hard it can be, it’s undeniably rewarding to overcome those challenges. Racing in a panic to cook up as much chiffon cake as possible, because you’ve only got two minutes before mealtime, adds a frantic energy to proceedings that can’t be found in many simulation games. The constant need to improve the culinary creations you can offer, and to have enough ready when it’s time to eat, lights a fire under you to be constantly motivated to keep on cooking.

The only time that this difficulty can feel arbitrary is when the game’s weather system comes into play. Most of the time, you don’t need to worry about the weather. Mild conditions are fine, and even the fires that break out on baking hot days, and the spirits that roam the land when the fog rolls in, can be kept under control if you’ve developed the right infrastructure. Sometimes, though, tornadoes strike, and there’s nothing you can really do.

To some degree, this makes sense. It shouldn’t be easy to deal with the fallout of a natural disaster. The way that these tornadoes tear through your carefully laid plans is a deliberate demonstration of the disruptive power that they possess. The problem is that Feastopia doesn’t do a great job of notifying you when these disasters begin, and which specific buildings they destroy. This means that if you can’t remember what used to occupy all of the vacant plots that have been left in the storm’s wake, you’re in trouble.

There’s a beauty in how several different overlapping systems need to hum together for Feastopia’s economy to function. When one part of this process is abruptly ripped out by an unplanned act of nature, however, it can be a major setback that’s difficult both to diagnose and to repair. While they’re not exactly common, these tornadoes strike slightly too frequently, adding an extra layer of disaster management to a game that’s already very challenging.

Cooking up a conclusion

If you’re looking for a city builder that’s simultaneously colourful, cheerful, and challenging, Feastopia will suit your palate nicely. Make no mistake, this game is as difficult as its art is endearing. At times, the challenge can be overbearing, but handling the heat in this kitchen reveals a truly appetising experience.