In 2021, indie developer Wishes Unlimited released Chicory: A Colorful Tale. Serving as one of that year’s best it’s also one of the best Zelda-like games that Nintendo didn’t make; a Zelda journey where you had to paint your way across the lands and overcome imposter syndrome and other mental health concerns. Undoubtedly a dynamic and transformative journey. While a critical success, it’s a title from the last few years I still consider severely underrated among the public eye. So where do Wishes Unlimited go from here? How do they launch themselves further into the indie game developer excellence echelon? Oh yeah, they make their own spin on Pokémon that takes the creature-collecting genre and meshes it with an RPG all about forming your volleyball team called Beastieball. Of course.
After spending a few hours with Beastieball in the lead-up to its late 2024 release into Early Access, I’m walking away from it with high hopes for the whimsical adventure. It’s an ace waiting to happen.
Beastieball sees the return of a majority of the primary talent from Chicory, including studio founder Greg Lobanov and artist Alexis Dean-Jones. Once more, the magic and wonder found in their prior ventures return as your journey kicks off with you needing to form a volleyball team of adorable little creatures known as, you guessed it, beasties. Beastieball is a sport that has been played in your character’s worlds for generations. A tradition as tried and true as time itself. However, the call to adventure starts when the official Beastieball League company begins tearing down your home in the outback in the interest of creating more stadiums, buildings and areas for them to prospect. To put a stop to this dastardly business and how much they’re tarring the grassroots and earnest nature of the beloved sport, you must travel the lands, conquering the Beastieball trainers near and far.
As far as table setting goes, Beastieball has nailed it already with this premise that invites you on a ride. Pokémon never really examines what it is you’re doing with all these adorable monsters nor the great big company that’s overruling these competition of monster battles. They shouldn’t. Though it’s a compelling idea and palpable experiment to explore here at ground zero where you’re watching your beloved sport that you’ve known and played all your life be bastardised ’til kingdom come, with wildlife being ripped up in front of your very eyes all in the interest of profit. Wishes Unlimited has got me hook line and sinker with this idea, with the starting area that I’m seeing destroyed offering very Australian outback bush-style environments, with flora and fauna that I can easily point to being referential to something grown or bred here down under.
Beastieball has also reeled me in with its wonderful sense of adventure. Sporting 2D character assets in a 3D world, your own avatar that you get to create and customise navigates the brave open world. Getting your series of starter Beasties in creatures like an axolotl-like named Axolati and a green gecko named Sprecko… that wonder that you got in your very first creature collecting game all returns here.
This feeling of excitement only continued for me when it came to exploring the Beastieball world and meeting the locals. Like Chicory prior, a lot of quirky, effortlessly charming and genuinely funny dialogue is found throughout. An amusing early battle sees you encounter a member of the ‘Rutile All-Stars,’ an older man who’s aged out of the game that you take to battling in an abandoned small sports hall, one of his teammates cheering from the sideline being even more geriatric than he. In another nearby town, a youth regales you about the Beastieball video games that are ‘basically the same every year, but still fun.’ This warm but also biting callout of a character is wearing none other than a mockup of the iconic green Zelda shirt and khaki shorts outfit of the 2000s. Iconic and genuinely funny stuff.
Beastie battles are turn-based and take place on a pop-up volleyball field where there are 2×2 grids on each side of the net. Playing with 2 players on each side, you take turns both attacking and defending in the hopes of passing the score threshold before your rival does. One can score by either landing the ball in play in an empty tile or whittling down a rival Beastie’s defence (labelled as ‘stamina’) to zero so that they’re unsuccessful in blocking a shot.
When it comes to attacking turns, you get three actions to use between your party, including moving a Beastie, volleying to one another and, inevitably, variations of spikes or attack strikes with different devastating effects to hopefully score that one point. I found this emulates a rally in actual volleyball quite well, with every careful eloquent step being what leads to that final blow. On the defence side of things, it’s terrifying as you play a game of chicken, trying your best to read where the AI is aiming. Are they doing an attack that’ll hit the top or bottom of the x or y-axis? Where should I position my Beasties to get the best coverage? If I use the block ability at the net with one of my team members can I accurately predict which of my opponents is actually about to take the shot, hence adding power to my next follow-up shot? Or will it all come crumbling down? These are engaging and tactical questions I have to ask myself constantly on the fly.
When it comes to recruiting and adding more Beasties to your roster and dex, this is achieved by completing specific tasks in a match and then also coming away with the win. Maybe you need to hit a certain amount of shots towards one Beastie type or keep a combo up (achieved by successful volleying and blocking of shots) for a certain amount of time. So far this is an engaging and just another means of making these turn-based battles more stimulating and requiring thought. If you’re not careful you might overpower your foes and win a match before you’ve even fulfilled the collecting pre-requisites. Be sure to lob one of the lighter attacks to foes every so often and also be absolutely certain you have jerseys in your backpack at all times so a win isn’t all for nothing.
Also returning from working with the crew on Chicory: A Colorful Tale is legendary trans composer Lena Raine whose works you’ll know and love from iconic soundtracks for beloved games such as Celeste and even later Minecraft updates. Her music is bursting with retro fusions and inspirations that are still earworms in my brain to this day. Without hyperbole, I often use it as contemplative and complimentary backing noise to my own writing, even this very article. Before this, I didn’t know how much I needed to hear a Lena Raine-composed spin on the type of music you’d find in Pokémon. How exactly does it fare you ask? Unbelievably well. It’s excellent. If you don’t believe me you can already find a lot of the soundtrack on Lena’s own personal YouTube. I recommend VS. The Mythic Dreamers, but the simple Welcome to Beastieball from the Demo OST is simple yet elegant low-fi vibes. As one trans person to another, I love to see Lena killing it for so long.
Beastieball is primed for your 2024 creature-collecting genre needs in a (shocking) year without a single mainline Pokémon game release. It’s filled with a weird, vibrant and wonderful world to explore with lots of cute little guys to wrangle up and freako NPCs to butt heads with.
I’m counting down the days til it releases in 2024, whenever that may be, and frankly so should you. Keep track of its pending Early Access PC release here.
UPDATE EFFECTIVE EARLY ACCESS RELEASE ON 13/11/2024
I’ve spent more time with Beastieball in the lead-up to the now available Early Access release and I continue to be thoroughly impressed with the game. I’m most in awe of how reverential the venture is to Pokémon. I’m not just talking about the mainline games, but the greater Pokémon name and its community. Wishes Unlimited is a fan of Pokémon fan games, including the option to play a randomizer run where any Beastie can pop up at any time. This has existed in Pokémon fan games and ROM hacks for years at this point but hasn’t been in an official entry to date! I gave this a whirl and immediately bumped into Beasties I hadn’t met yet in my main save and had the terrifying rush of not knowing their skills or how to take them on this early.
The reverence and majesty don’t stop there either. With Beastieball, it feels like the skies are the limit. The customisation options that regularly get introduced to you feel endless. You’re allowed to regularly pick and change your team name from a library of terms that only grows. Right now, my team is known as the Newborn Enigmas but previously were called the Sad Girls. Everyone in the world of Beastieball is just as weird or extravagant as I am, and relationships with other trainers or characters don’t cease the moment a big battle is over either. You can unlock a growing library of contacts in your phone that you can then undergo bonding events with. Getting to know my bestie Riley more via sharing the play of an RPG they love, getting to know the ins and outs of the Beastieball representative Reese… they’re all really endearing interactions and characters. Don’t even get me started on the weird supervillain-looking guy with jet boots called Jack who just seemingly hates you for no reason. I need to know his deal.
Online battles and trading with other players, plenty of dungeon-delving exploration goodness, lush and varied biomes… It’s hard not to be in awe of Beastieball and all the things it’s doing that even the juggernaut of the genre is lagging in at times. Even in Early Access, Beastieball also feels incredibly complete. For one, you can actually beat the game and experience a healthy dose of post-game content to boot. Wishes Unlimited cites that what’s still to come is the final assets for some characters and Beasties to replace the current placeholder ones. I’ve seen some of these in practice and though it’s a weird look and choice for this to largely be the only reason the game’s in Early Access, I could also never accuse Beastieball of lacking in plenty of exciting stuff to do.
Beastieball is available now to play in Early Access via Steam and it’s got an ocean of exciting monster-collecting content to get stuck into. If you’re a lover of sports anime and all things classic adventure RPGs, I can’t recommend it enough.
About the Author
Charlie Kelly
She/Her, They/Them
Charlie loves her video games as much as she loves dumb, charming JRPG protagonists: probably way too much. You can often catch her spending too much time being emotional over LGBT stories in games. She also thinks Yakuza 6 is the best one.
