Feed the Scorchpot is a recently released tabletop-inspired roguelite with lovely art and a stellar theme, and I’ve been meaning to tell you all about it.
I last wrote about the game back in April, when I sampled the public demo and got a first taste of its moreish gameplay. Even back then, Feed the Scorchpot was shaping up very nicely indeed.
Now the game has been fully released, and I was prompted to take another look when I saw that there had been a small update. The focus of said update was to smooth the introduction to the game’s core mechanics.
It’s a good call, I think, because after playing the game again today, I had to relearn everything – this isn’t a simple game. Feed the Scorchpot is very tabletop-inspired, and it reminds me of Catan and Carcassonne, two board game greats. Tile placement is the order of the day.
Speaking of the order of the day, that’s an easy segue into the game’s theme. You’re in charge of an island, split up into hexagons, and every year, you’ve got to cook up a bunch of flavoursome grub for a dragon who’ll eat you if the food isn’t up to scratch.
To feed this hungry, fire-breathing lizard, you must harvest resources from your island, spice them up with flavour, and enhance them with essence. In reality, this translates into a Balatro-style multiplier system where your resources/fodder are multiplied by flavour, and then again by the much lower essence total.
You build up your scores by rolling dice, lining up your rolls to activate tiles on the island, and then you can use recipes from the shop to further boost your grand total. At the end of the day, this is a number-go-up type of game, but it’s so cleverly done, and I think it’ll be of particular interest to board game fans out there.
Finally, a word on the audio-visual presentation. While it might be a fairly simple game to behold, I think that the art is fantastic, the atmosphere is lovely, and the whole thing is just tremendously pleasing to engage with. It’s borderline cosy, except it’ll also break your brain with its fiendish maths-driven challenge.
Feed the Scorchpit is developed by Moravian and is out now on Steam PC (Win). I played it via access provided by the developer.
