I am enamoured by the tactical gameplay that you often see in games like Fire Emblem. A lesser-known fact is that I’m also a bit of a foodie. Now you’re telling me there’s a game out there that manages to indulge in a bit of both and more? That’s exactly the experience I got when I tried out the demo for Food Devils.

The demo is clearly designed to highlight the gameplay, so a lot of the review is going to focus on that. You have your units in a grid, and on your turn, you’re able to move all of them and do one action per unit. You can attack, use special skills, and move. You can also set up which attack you want to use as a counter for when enemies attack you on their turns.

A lot of the mechanics were easy to get a grasp of, as it takes inspiration from gameplay seen in titles like Fire Emblem. The world of Food Devils presents some interesting twists as well. Your party is composed of up to four humans and a devil. The devil is going to be the most powerful unit of your party, and if defeated, it’s an instant game over. However, devils can’t do anything unless they have calories, and that’s where the humans come in. Moves done by the humans not only do damage to enemies, but under certain conditions generate hunger for themselves and calories for the devil. By having the humans fight it gives you more options on what to do with the devil of your choosing. The hunger number is important to keep up with, though, as once it hits 100, a unit dies. Additionally, when a human reaches 0 hit points, their odds of surviving are dependent on how low their hunger is.

It’s an interesting and unique mechanic that really adds a layer of strategy I’ve not seen before. I like how it demands you evenly use units. If you use a human too much, then they get hungry, and their odds of surviving go way down. If you rely too heavily on the devil, then it’ll burn up all of its calories and be stuck, unable to fight. It took me a bit to get used to this mechanic, but once I did, I really enjoyed coming up with fun tactics around it.

Battles are found through expeditions, which are a series of icons leading up to a boss fight. You can find battles, events that can be helpful, and places to rest. For every icon in the expedition, you’re given a choice. If it’s a battle, you can pick one of two battle types, such as Hunt, escape, defend, or more, which decides the goal of the current battle. For events, you’re given one of three events with a set percentage of getting gold, skills, HP recovery, etc. So you have maps where you can choose which direction to go, with choices for each spot on the map. There’s a lot of customization for your expeditions.

After each battle, you get gold, ingredients, and skills. You get a choice of A, B, or C skill packs to randomly assign skills of that rank. These are exclusive to the current expedition and help boost your party as they continue making their way to the boss. The reason why these skills are so vital is that any damage, calories, or hunger from the end of the previous battle is carried over to the next. I’ve picked pathways to take on my expedition largely based on how much or little damage I had at the end of the previous battle.

At the end of the expedition, you return to your restaurant, where you can prepare for the next one. Using furniture to attract humans of various traits to recruit for your party, you then plan out dishes using the ingredients you gathered to assign specific boosts. Health, damage reduction, and anything you need to make the stats of the human members of your party able to hold their own for the fights ahead.

Now, if you’ve seen any show on the Food Network, you know presentation is important. In the spirit of that, I want to talk about it here, as I loved the use of vibrant colors, which made everything visually pop. It features easy-to-read and easy on the eyes artwork for the characters, and it’s a genuinely pretty game.

So what we have here is a game that mixes the charm of tactical turn-based games, restaurant development, and trading card gatcha mechanics, all seamlessly combined to create a really fun game. At its core, it takes the gameplay we’re used to in titles like Fire Emblem, but adds new mechanics that really help give this game individuality. I even took the time to go to the other side of my house to get the PlayStation controller so I could sit back and play the game rather than hunch over the keyboard because I was quickly losing track of time trying it out.

If you want to check it out for yourself, be sure to add it to your wishlist on Steam and follow them on Twitter/X for updates on the game’s development.