SUMMARY:
In New Meat, you play as silent protagonist Niko, the new hire at Burger Site. Like most fast food chains IRL, Burger Site’s burgers are made of monsters from the massive meat dungeon beneath the restaurant, and each day it’s your job to delve in and slay enough to hit your daily meat quota. The quota increases each day until the end of day 5, where the game ends and you get to know whether or not you got hired, fired, and/or worse.
GAMEPLAY: (I’m probably not the best at describing gameplay, but I’ll try.)
New Meat is a roguelike turn-based RPG. It takes place over a course of five days, and each day after briefly chatting with your coworkers you delve into the meat dungeon to collect meat, which you mainly get from fighting enemies, but can also find in chests, crates, on the floor, etc. You have a meat quota to fulfill that increases each day, and the more meat you collect, the more money you earn to buy stat upgrades with for the next day.
The way the game works is that you move forwards from room-to-room, and have a set of enemies that you need to get rid of before moving to the next one. There’s three “segments” to the dungeon (although they look the same visually) and each ends with a boss. Each segment introduces new enemies and room types. Each time you enter a new room, it has a chance to be a special room, where you’ll gain some sort of boon, whether that be restoring a life, choosing one of three curios (permanent items that give you some sort of buff for the rest of your run), or getting to a weapon upgrade room. Oh yeah, speaking of which;
You have 6 weapons to choose between which favor different playstyles. In said weapon upgrade rooms, each weapon has 3 upgrades to choose between, and each of those upgraded weapons have 2 additional upgrades, thus meaning that each weapon ends up having 6 “variations”. I like this feature a lot and it makes different runs with the same weapon feel fresh.
The game also has difficulty modifiers that you can choose between, adding debuffs if you want to make your run harder. The reward for doing these are a few new randomly occurring gameplay features, and a higher chance for a door to appear that warps you to a secret area that either adds to the lore or feature a minigame. These doors can appear normally, but more rarely so.
In addition to the difficulty modifiers, the game also has a Halloween Mode which adds a few new gimmicks to the game as well as [spoiler]a new weapon[/spoiler] and redecorates the surface section of Burger Site to fit the season, complete with some new flavor text.
The game generally has a lot of freedom in what risks you want to take, and you’re free to leave the dungeon scot-free at any time as long as there are no enemies in the room you’re currently in. It has a lot of RNG, but in a fun way that rewards skill that rarely feels unfair. The game also has a lot of gimmicks and I love gimmicks.
However, I think that the game’s biggest weakness gameplay-wise is that, while a lot of this game is explained well (and there’s a guide by the developer in the “guides” tab on the Steam page that explains more), not all of it is:
I didn’t initially understand that monsters only got stronger if you kept progressing in the dungeon after defeating a boss (instead of going back to the entrance room to deposit bones and such) which made my first run an overly easy slog. I also never knew that you could skip the opening crawl in the already quite long unskippable intro by holding down the cancel key until I randomly stumbled upon it when looking through the files. Speaking of which, I do wish that there was a way to skip the credits when replaying the game since they’re also quite long.
There were also some parts where I was confused what was just worldbuilding and what was actual gameplay elements; for example, the game explains that at the start of each week the bosses you kill respawn and your weapons get downgraded to their base forms. I was confused whether or not this had any bearing on gameplay or not (which it didn’t; it’s only there to explain why your weapons aren’t upgraded and the bosses are still around despite this place having existed for more than half a century). I also initially didn’t understand that a run was limited to 5 days, with nothing carrying over in-between runs. I feel that the store page is (unintentionally) kind of vague about this.
One last complaint I have is that you need to equip a weapon and then navigate to the skill menu to see what a skill does. It’s pretty grating to repeatedly do that.
But in the end, those are still small blemishes on a genuinely great game. There’s a lot of freedom and replayability and whenever I play this game I have a blast. Runs tend to last around 4 hours for me.
STORY:
The story’s good. It’s fun to experience while also having moments where it’s more serious and dark. There’s also a good amount of humor sprinkled throughout the game, which I personally found very funny. You can tell that the developer is a fan of Toby Fox’s games.
A lot of the deeper lore is implied or hinted at rather than explicitly told (in fact, even as someone who has played it quite a bit and looked into the code, I still don’t fully understand it). Whether or not that’s a strength or not is up to you, but I did find it fun and not too hard to piece together most of the general plot. Since this game is (unfortunately) not very popular, you also don’t have to worry about being spoiled and can do it at your own pace.
The game also uses something it calls the Triple-Take Dialogue System, where a lot of the game’s lines each have 3 variations of it that flow seamlessly into one-another. This makes the dialogue feel a lot less repetitive during scripted scenes, and I don’t think I’ve really seen this done before in a video game. It’s simple yet effective. That said, I recall this mostly applying to scripted scenes with Natalie; for example, her optional dialogue options in the office don’t have this, and neither do the other characters (Cliff, Reginald or Nora). Speaking of which, that leads me to my main complaint story-wise:
The characters, aside from Natalie, don’t really say or do much. They’re displayed prominently in the artwork on the store page and title screen, but they only have a few lines of dialogue each day (and Nora’s gag is that she’s very uninterested and barely talks with anyone). In fact, if you don’t enter the kitchen, you’ll never see Nora or Reginald once until the ending.
Natalie has a good amount of dialogue each day and always has a presence even inside of the dungeon, with the notes scattered through it, but for the rest they just have the same few lines over and over.
Also, one more complaint I have is that the Classified Ending is kind of difficult to figure out how to get by yourself. Even if you meet the criteria there’s nothing to show that you triggered it.
Overall, though, the story and dialogue is great.
CONCLUSION:
This is a great game with a lot of replayability more than worth its low price. I definitely recommend it!
It’s a shame that it’s so obscure since it clearly had a lot of love put into it, so if you play it and end up liking it, spread the word! Write your own review (which I’ve heard helps more than you might think), recommend it to a friend, make a video about it, post about it on social media, etc.
MY SCORE: 96,5/100
