Beastieball (Early Access Review)

I’ve been playing Pokémon games for the majority of the time I’ve been alive. For someone going through elementary school in the late 90s, it was basically unavoidable. Most people in my age group can wax poetic about some kind of Pokémon-related playground memories from childhood, whether it be making a card trade for that holographic Blastoise they really wanted or somehow pulling out a win against their friend’s Game Shark, uh, assisted team made up of exclusively legendary monsters (yes, I still remember that look on your face when I beat you, Tony). Pokémon’s social aspect and sense of mystery were what elevated it beyond all of its contemporaries to create an impact on culture at large. 

Decades later, I still play every mainline game in the series, albeit usually while feeling varying degrees of disappointment or outright annoyance. I cling to Pokémon like other people cling to lacklustre sports teams or problematic relatives that you only see at Thanksgiving, hoping against hope that next time will be different, but knowing deep down that you’re probably still going to be let down again next time. And despite trying a plethora of other monster-catching games and even quite liking some of them, none of them managed to capture all of the things that made me fall in love with those first couple batches of Pokémon games, not really. 

I’ll admit, after all of the different monster-catching games of all shapes and sizes out there that I’ve played, I was pretty cynical that any indie-scale Pokémon-inspired game was going to be anything other than one more personal disappointment. Even one from the team that made some of my favourite indie games of all time, including my 2021 game of the year, Chicory: A Colourful Tale, left me feeling more anxious than anything. Anxious that a followup to their previous masterpiece was about to be wasted on a Pokémon-like, and also anxious that I wouldn’t be able to connect with a work coming out of that team. How wonderful it is to be wrong, in this case: Beastieball is not only the best Pokémon-inspired game I’ve ever played, but it also has a better fundamental understanding of the things I used to love about Pokémon than, well, Pokémon. That sounds hyperbolic, I’m sure, and I don’t expect everyone to agree with me. But after a relatively slow first couple of hours, Beastieball started hitting me harder than my Beetlback’s Hyperspike from the net, to the point where I had blasted through its 15-20 hour campaign in just a handful of sittings, something I rarely find myself doing with games of that length anymore.

But let’s take a step back for a moment and breakdown what Beastieball actually is before I let myself off the leash for it. As mentioned previously, it’s a Pokémon-inspired game from the team behind games such as Chicory: A Colourful Tale and Wandersong. At the most basic level, you’re exploring an overworld to recruit little creatures (beasties, in this case) to your Beastieball team and engaging in turn-based combat against other Beastieball teams, be they wild beasties or coached by another character. Unlike Pokémon, the beasties here don’t engage in direct acts of violence against one another, instead competing against one another in what is essentially 2v2 volleyball, but with little dudes. 

The battle system in Beastieball is quite simply brilliant, to the point where I was never groaning about getting into a match, something I inevitably end up doing in any other RPG I’ve ever played. Teams consist of 5 beasties, with two out on the field at once, and the ability to swap out beasties during your defensive phase. Each beastie can have three abilities equipped at once, which can be categorized into offensive, defensive, or support, and you can also move beasties around on the field, with them getting a defence buff while in the back lane and an offence buff while close to the net, and you get 1 action per defence phase and 3 per offence It’s a relatively simple setup in the broad strokes, but it’s in team synergy and combinations of beasties that the game starts feeling like a full-on strategy game as opposed to merely turn-based volleyball. 

One of my favourite plays, albeit a very basic one, was having my opera singer frog, Hopra, volley the ball with Net Rush, an ability that tosses the ball to your partner while shifting Hopra to the net all in one action, using the Set ability with the partner beastie to send the ball back to Hopra, Set being a move that gives the status effect “jazzed” to whoever the ball was volleyed to. With Hopra all jazzed up, thereby giving it a 1.5x attack boost, I’d then spike the ball at the opposing beastie team with its strongest move, Supercommit, which would basically melt away any beastie that didn’t have strong spirit resistance. 

Again, it’s a very basic order of operations, but with the right team and timing, it was able to carry me through a lot of the harder endgame and even some postgame fights. There are dozens upon dozens of abilities of each type and a different movepool for each and every beastie in the game, making the possibilities staggering. What’s also interesting is that, much like volleyball, a point can be scored merely by your ball hitting the ground as opposed to a rival beastie catching it, and the game has plenty of moves and abilities that let you exploit that as well. It also means that you’re able to sometimes hit way, WAY above your weight class if you have the right team composition and strategy without it feeling like you’re cheating the game. All of this combined to make this the most exciting turn-based battle system since 2022’s Chained Echoes, a game that similarly leaned hard into providing unique, strategic encounters built around strategy and improvisation as opposed to merely watching numbers go up every time you levelled. I didn’t have time to test it for the sake of this review, but the game even has competitive online play. Should the community end up taking off, I could imagine this being something people stick with for a long time, particularly if the balance is there.

When you’re not competing in the sport of beastieball, you’ll be exploring an overworld that’s much larger than I was expecting, full of towns, memorable NPCs, shops, and tons of optional areas, secrets, and even some lite dungeons and puzzle solving. There truly is a lot to see and do here if you’re looking to find everything, to the point where I somehow missed an entire forest area in the northeast section of the map until I was in the postgame, which was a shame since there were quite a few cool beasties there that I could have recruited. Speaking of the beasties, they have to have a section of this review entirely dedicated to them, as every monster-raising game lives or dies for me based entirely off of how good the creature designs are. The designs on display here are exceptionally good and succeed in evoking the old-school Pokémon feel better than anything else about the game. While I’m no “gen wunner” by any stretch (my favourite Pokémon generation is the fifth, for what it’s worth!), a lot of newer Pokémon designs inherently end up looking a bit too busy and overdesigned for my taste. Part of that is the sheer number of Pokémon that exist and how many shapes and colour schemes the artists have to come up with for them—a problem the Beastieball developers obviously didn’t have to deal with, but it still seemed like a Herculean task to me for an indie team to come up with 100 different creature designs and not buckle under their own weight. But if there was any struggle behind the curtains, it doesn’t show in the end product because a large chunk of these designs wouldn’t feel out of place in the first three generations of Pokémon. Some particular favourites include the aforementioned opera singing frog, Hopra; Trat, which is just a rat hiding inside a can; and Turogue, the scrappiest little flat-headed turtle you’ve ever seen.

The designs obviously do a lot of the heavy lifting in making you care about your beasties, but there’s a lot of little things to the side that really make your squad feel like a team you’ve built and nurtured. There are equivalents for things like EVs (passive stats you can alter for minmaxing purposes) and shinies from Pokémon here, which add to the replayability of the game, but there are a lot of little details with the beasties and the writing and mechanics around them that add a lot of flavour to the game. As your squad gets used to playing with one another, they can develop relationships with each other and unlock combos that can only be triggered with those two specific beasties. There are multiple different types of relationships the beasties can have with one another, though one that seemed more rare than the others in my playthrough was the relationship type of “rivals.” Specifically, the rivalry between my Hopra and Illugus reached a point where they were sabotaging each other in battle, resulting in some of my plays being ruined by their bickering. After a few matches like that, between which I was receiving text about the state of their feelings towards one another, the game told me that their emotions had cooled and their relationship had shifted into being best friends. It’s simple, but the dynamic nature of how this rivalry was manifesting itself and when, ending with them becoming genuine friends, felt like the absolute best kind of sports anime storytelling, and I was truly touched by multiple things like this throughout my time with the game.

That’s important, because I value the storytelling and writing in the previous games from this team more than I do from most other game studios. Despite being a game much more focused on its actual gameplay than Wandersong or Chicory, Beastieball still manages to address large-scale topics like climate change, corporatism, gentrification, and trying to preserve nature in a world beset with all of those issues. Despite being issues that seem insurmountable in the real world, especially considering the current political climate the world over, Beastieball is primarily telling a story about how the power of individuals doesn’t need to feel as slight as they do right now. The characters throughout are delightful and twee, and the game has a lot of fun with the use of font and text colours, in a way that shouldn’t be surprising to you if you’re familiar with those prior works. 

Lastly, I couldn’t not mention the absolutely fantastic, stupidly great soundtrack from renowned composer Lena Raine. First coming to my attention with her work on the soundtrack for Celeste, she’s pretty easily managed what I would have thought was an impossible feat coming off of that seminal work: every soundtrack she’s worked on since has been a steady and noticeable improvement, and having her making the music for a turn-based RPG is an actual dream come true. The sheer amount and variety of battle themes in particular is staggering, bringing to mind Paper Mario: The Origami King, one of the best soundtracks in modern video games. As much as I enjoyed everything about Beastieball, it’s the soundtrack that I’m most excited for people to experience and geek out about once it’s available for purchase. On that note, it is worth mentioning that this is an early access release. The experience already feels full and complete as is, and the areas of the game that are tantalisingly locked off with teases of updates to come feel like extra goodies to look forward to in the future, cherries on top of an already very generous sundae, as opposed to some integral missing piece that makes the game not worth checking out immediately. I’ll be excitedly keeping an eye on what future updates are coming to Beastieball, but just know that you’re not going to be hitting a progression wall at some point and then twiddling your thumbs for a few months waiting for the game to be finished if you decide to jump in now. And I hope that you do.