Cassette Beasts

Cassette Beasts is a monster-taming game that follows many common conventions of the collect and battle genre. The game is played in a third-person view, overhead perspective and consists of three basic screens: an overworld on the island of New Wirral, where the player was transported to; a side-view battle screen; and a menu interface in the form of a cassette player, where the player can configure their monsters, items, and settings.

The player character and companion can transform into monsters to battle other monsters. The game eschews a random encounter format, and all monsters are visible in the overworld. During battles, each monster can use attacks that are assigned with stickers, which can be transferred between different monsters. Monsters have hit points that determine if they can be used, and the player's character has their own health bar.

Cassette Beasts was developed by UK-based Bytten Studio, a company of two full-time staff, Jay Baylis and Tom Coxon. Both team members had previous experience working at Chucklefish and had worked on both Wargroove and Starbound among other games. They also had an animator, a character illustrator, and a musician (Jay's brother, Joel) who worked on development of the game part-time. Baylis and Coxon designed the game to be targeted at adults who had grown up with Pokémon and may be looking for a deeper story and more complex gameplay mechanics.

In order to create the 14,000 possible fusions in the game, the developers made the monsters modular, allowing for parts to be combined automatically by the game. The combat in the game was inspired by Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest, specifically the aspects where status effects can halt momentum in battle. The game's plot takes inspiration from isekai, where the main character is transported in a portal to another dimension, but it twists the genre conventions by having everyone present have also been transported to the island in a similar manner. In an interview, Baylis said that this approach to the plot allowed them to put the focus on the people who were present.

Cassette Beasts received "generally favorable" reviews, according to review aggregator website Metacritic. GamesRadar+ noted that user feedback on Steam was extremely positive, with users praising the game for its low price point and comparing it positively to Pokémon.

Several reviewers felt the game was an improvement of the Pokémon video game series. Eurogamer's Caelyn Ellis said that she loved Cassette Beasts while only liking Pokémon, and felt that it was like a remixed song that was better than the original. RPG Fan's Des Miller felt that the game's Pokémon inspiration was obvious, but that it was unique because of "its aesthetic, design, and most importantly, its heart". Rock, Paper, Shotgun's Katharine Castle noted that it was a Pokémon game for adults, describing it as an "evolutionary offshoot" of the series. Ellis agreed with Castle's sentiment, saying, "Of all the deviations from the standard Pokémon formula, the one I appreciate the most is that Cassette Beasts isn't forced to cater to younger children."