Combining satisfying pinball physics with tactical decision making!
Beast Breaker is an indie physics-based puzzle game developed and published by Vodeo Games, and released on September 23, 2021 for Nintendo Switch and PC (via the Epic Games Store).Skipper is a tiny mouse, tasked by their friends with defending innocents in their village from giant mosaic beasts that threaten everything. Taking indirect control of Skipper, the player must choose a style of attack, line up the shot, and then send Skipper flying. Along the way, Skipper runs into new friends that help them craft new weapons and equipment, as well as train them to use said equipment for new fighting styles.
Beast Breaker features the following tropes:
- Ambidextrous Sprite: Averted. Characters with asymmetrical designs (like Granny or Tempest) have this appropriately reflected in their sprites.
- Amphibian Assault: Bogspitter Beasts.
- And the Adventure Continues: Skipper and their motley crew are unable to convince the Queen (nor anyone else in a position of power) to take any measure to prevent further Beasts from emerging, but are determined to keep saving settlements and push for lasting change, one way or another.
- Anti-Regeneration: A couple of status effects induce this.
- Scarring stops a Beast from regrowing scales for a couple turns, and permanently reduces the number that regrow afterwards.
- Scorched scales cannot regrow any scales adjacent to them.
- Attack Its Weak Point: Beasts can usually be attacked just about anywhere, but to hurt a Beast, you have to destroy one of its secondary cores. To destroy a Beast entirely, you must destroy its primary core.
- Badass Adorable: Skipper the mouse may be tiny, but they can pack quite a punch if they go flying.
- Bat People: Alchemilla.
- Be the Ball: The entire concept of the game! You need to equip Skipper with the best weapons for the situation, and then send them flying.
- Big Creepy-Crawlies: Nestrax, Tuskcrawler, and Papillopticon Beasts.
- Bird People: Dandy and Echo.
- Book Ends: The game begins with a Beast attacking the farm, a distress call from outside, and Skipper holed up in the cellar looking towards Granny's old sword, which inspires them to stand and fight. In the end, after their audience with the Queen was All for Nothing, Skipper is holed up in the cellar in the midst of a Heroic BSoD; looking towards the sword again inspires them to stand and keep fighting.
- Cats Are Mean: Strikertooth Beasts.
- Corrupt Corporate Executive: To some degree, the Queen, who calls herself Her Executive Majesty and uses corporate keywords (i.e. talking about her Queendom's Q3 milestones).
- Damage-Increasing Debuff: Cracked cores take additional damage when hit.
- Damage Over Time: Scales afflicted with Acid and cores afflicted with Corrosion will take damage at the start of the Beast's turn.
- The Dandy: As you might guess from his name, Dandy himself.
- Draconic Abomination: The DRAGON Beast, only found in the Cloud as a Sequential Boss. Especially on display with its final form, the ARCHDRAGON, which barely looks like a dragon anymore.
- Evil Is Not a Toy: In their attempt to combat the Beasts, the Queen and her scientists choose not to do the reasonable thing (research alternative energy methods and reuse the corruption per Umbra's research) and instead create their own Beast (the DRAGON) to combat them. Not long after Skipper arrives in the Cloud, the DRAGON goes berserk and has to be put down.
- Feathered Fiend: Needlebeak Beasts.
- Flechette Storm: The fourth weapon type: you're equipped with an arsenal of knives to throw, but must recollect them after use.
- Fog of War: During the tracking phase of a mission, Skipper and company need to explore to gather resources and track down the Beast roaming the map.
- Forced Level-Grinding: Of course, grinding Renown levels has no statistical benefit to Skipper; stats are influenced primarily by weapons, upgrades to weapons, and armor. Rather, higher levels of Renown are required to take on more missions, and the endgame cannot be attempted before Renown level 25.
- Funny Animal: A world full of them.
- Furry Confusion: Unlike every other critter, who are all anthropomorphized to some degree, Cinnabar is limbless.
- Giant Enemy Crab: Clatterclaw Beasts.
- Giant Spider: Tuskcrawler Beasts are somewhere between this and wild boars.
- Good All Along: Cinnabar's motivations for helping the party are called into question for most of the game, but as long as they can guide Skipper in the right direction to help others, they're willing to work together. As it turns out, Cinnabar's efforts are entirely altruistic, and they were just desperate to find someone, anyone willing to fight the Beasts, and their only actual secret was that they wanted to save one person in particular— Umbra.
- Happily Married: Cinnabar and Umbra.
- Healing Factor: A Beast's Regrowth stat determines how many scales it will regrow on its turn. Growth-type beasts are especially notorious for this. Scarring a Beast will permanently impair this stat with each invocation.
- Item Crafting: In between missions, new weapon parts and armor can be crafted at the farm. During expeditions, Skipper can pick up materials during the tracking phase and use them to craft useful consumables at the Settlement before they fight the Beast.
- Knightly Sword and Shield: The first available weapon type: use your sword skills to launch yourself at the Beast to deal damage, and use your shield skills to protect from attacks (or to spend as a resource for more powerful skills).
- Lethal Chef: Mallow's smoothies can be so toxic they inflict Acid on anything they're thrown at.
- Magitek: Powerful magical batteries, siphoning energy from natural Motes, have led to a technological revolution in the span of a few short generations, leading to Schizo Tech like cell phones and holograms existing alongside more mundane tools. They're also the source of the setting's woes: at some point, it was discovered that the Motes' magical essence was not returning to the natural cycle as intended, but by then the technology was too widespread and the power source was left running. As a result, some regions were drained of all magic and left barren, while others were polluted by toxic magical runoff in the water. And then some of that runoff started to crystalize and form Beast cores...
- Mixed Animal Species Team: By endgame, your team will include a mouse (Skipper), a porcupine (Jonquil), a chipmunk (Poppy), two birds of wildly different species (Dandy and Echo), a frog (Mallow), a shark (Tempest), a bat (Alchemilla), a snake (Cinnabar), and a moth (Umbra).
- Moth Menace: Papillopticon Beasts. Averted with Umbra.
- Must Make Amends: Umbra was one of the royal scientists responsible for Beasts being created in the first place, and he has sworn to put things right.
- Overly Long Name: Lord Dandelion Gladiolus du Fritillaria the Fifth, Heir to the Marquis of Summercrest. "Dandy", for short.
- Pinball Projectile: Arrows, knives, or Skipper themself will ricochet off of arena walls and Beast fragments. Certain abilities grow stronger with each bounce.
- Retired Badass: Granny was once a Beast Breaker like Skipper, alongside her twin sister Nettle. She gave up the mantle and retreated to her old farm after Nettle was killed in action.
- Shifting Sand Land: Tradehaven Wastes.
- Speech Impediment: Skipper has a tendency to stutter in long conversations. This causes problems when the Queen demands their attention alone.
- Sssssnake Talk: Cinnabar is prone to this on occasion. This is because they're genuinely a snake underneath their armor, although the armor makes them look like a Feathered Serpent.
- Start X to Stop X: The Cloud's plan to protect themselves from the ever-growing Beast threat: create their own Beast, the DRAGON.
- The Straight and Arrow Path: The second weapon type: gather ammo each turn, and use it to strike at the Beast from a distance. Energy recharges for every arrow still in the quiver at turn's end.
- Tentacled Terror: Hexawhip Beasts.
- Threatening Shark: Jawtooth and Sawtooth Beasts, complete with a Shark Fin of Doom on the overworld map.
- Time-Limit Boss: All Beasts are this, represented by their Rampage timer - if not defeated within a certain amount of turns, the Beast will proceed to attack the settlement you are defending, resulting in a loss. This can be mitigated through status effects like Taunt (which suspends the timer and extends the maximum duration), or by destroying the Beast's secondary cores (which will fully reset the Rampage timer to the maximum amount of turns possible).
- Variable Mix:
- Each room of the farm (the Hearth, the Kitchen, the Forge, and the Cellar) has a different variation of its theme, which further evolve as the story progresses and more party members join.
- Each area and mission theme has four variants: one for the tracking phase, and three for the battle phase depending on the Beast's element (Shard, Forge, or Growth). The final battle has a fifth variant for the Arcane ARCHDRAGON, and the soundtrack has
unused Arcane variants for every battle theme.
- Wicked Weasel: Her Executive Majesty herself.
- Wild Magic: Runs rampant in the Glitchpeaks.
- You Are Not Alone: After Skipper isolates themself in the cellar after their failure to motivate action from the Cloud, the others point out that they've helped them all enough and bring up ways to help ease their burden in the ongoing fight against the Beasts, whether it by cleaning up the landscape, developing alternative energy production methods, or even training new Beast Breakers. This further motivates Skipper to keep up the fight.
