I snagged this little game from my HumbleBundle subscription, as part of this month's offering of games, and I thought I'd take a few minutes to give a first impression of the game.
Initially, this caught my eye in the list because of the graphics style - it reminded me a lot of another long-time favorite game of mine - Starbound, as well as Terraria.
While the animation style is similar to those games, there doesn't seem (at this point at least) to be any crafting element to Monster Sanctuary at all, but that's okay because what it does offer is a really fun little side-scrolling platformer and strategy game.
At the start of the game we're given a little lore-dump of the world, explaining that certain monsters bond with family lines and serve those families forever, and those lineages are Monster Keepers...
And then, the game gives us a Pokemon-style 'choose your companion' screen. Similar to other companion-based games, each of the four monsters has an element associated to it (the usual four: fire, water, earth, wind) and each has a unique skill as well as different stat points for defense, attack, etc.
🎼We're gonna be the very best, like no-one ever was🎼
I picked an eagle for my first playthrough, and opted to name it 'Seven'.
With my monster companion picked out, we are dumped onto something called the Keeper's Trail, which serves as the game's tutorial. It's all pretty standard fare, and our companion, Seven, explains that most monsters aren't like him. Most of them won't want to help us. To gain helpful monsters as part of our team, we have to attack and kill the wild monsters in the world, get an egg from them, and then hatch that.
Seven explains that our hatched monsters will bond with us and thus fight with us. So, immediately, we attack the Slime monster and it drops into a turn-based strategy fight. I didn't take screenshots of those early battles, but I have one from later in the tutorial to give an idea of what that looks like.
These chumps don't stand a chance.
Our monsters have a set of skills we pick from, and each skill is tied to an element. As usual, elemental weakness and strength come into play in this game, though early on like this it doesn't make a ton of difference.
Once we defeat the Slime (or other monsters) we are given a battle-rating screen, and then our loot.
Occasionally, as part of our loot drop we get a monster egg that we can hatch. You can get doubles too, so if there's a particular monster you really like... it seems to be possible to collect more of them to try different skill builds.
This reminds me to give a look at the skill tree. Each monster has a unique skill tree, broken down into five level-based tiers.
Blobert is a debuff king
There's something like 101 different monsters you can collect, train, and use in this game, and their use isn't limited to battles either. Seven, our Eagle companion for example can be used to 'glide' across gaps too large to jump - which lets us access chests in the world and other fun stuff like that.
My little fire-worm thing allows you to burn away vines, which lets us access new parts of the map and get fun loot and such as well. You can break hidden walls, make barriers, and all kinds of other things I'm sure I'm missing.
Our Yeti-like guy for example can be used to smash walls.
Seven, on the other hand, lets us glide for a few precious seconds.
Another neat thing we can do is equip each of our monsters with weapons and accessories, to help bolster their natural stats or make up for shortcomings. We can also feed them to further improve some stats, which is a neat little mechanic I haven't done much with yet.
I haven't made it to the main 'Keepers Sanctuary' yet, which as far as I understand it is the kind of central town where most Monster Keepers reside... and I'm excited to get to that later. I have just recently completed the tutorial section and received another lore-dump explaining that some monsters are known as Champions - and these are much tougher than most... which usually isn't a problem because there aren't many of them. Except, more and more are being found. Something is afoot, and we learn that Keepers are getting stuck in remote locations attempting to deal with the rising number of Champions out there in the wild.
Sooner or later, we're going to have to get to the bottom of what's causing these uniquely powerful monsters to appear with such frequency I'm sure.
It's going to be a long journey, collecting all these monsters and becoming a Master Keeper... but as this is a pretty fun game, I'm looking forward to the journey.
If you're interested in this game, it's pretty cheap on Steam, available for Nintendo Switch, and of course is part of this month's current Humble Bundle. It's got full controller support, and is a really fun little indie game. Definitely consider picking it up!
Until next time friends, happy gaming!
