Monster Sanctuary is a monster-collecting metroidvania for Basically Everything and PC, that innovates upon the traditional monster-battler formula by being difficult and the traditional indie-developed metroidvania formula by being good.

The concept of the game is familiar: you fight monsters, collect them, travel through the metroidvania overworld and solve puzzles that are Resident-Evil-tier difficulty, all while collecting new abilities through monsters that allow you to levitate, cut down vines blocking your path, or activate elemental orbs used in puzzles.

The real gameplay is in the battles, of course. You have a party of 6 monsters, and send out 3 at a time. Each has health & mana (mana which partially regenerates each turn) and will take 1 action per turn. In regular random encounters, you fight against 3 wild monsters -- in trainer battles, another full team of 6 -- and in Champion battles, 1 monster that acts multiple times per turn.

The order in which your monsters move can be arranged however you would like. Why this is important has to do with the game's combo system. Each spell (generally) will "hit" multiple times; for example, Slash deals 100% damage x 2 for 200% damage total, and a buff to your party's defense will "hit" 3 times as it buffs your 3 monsters individually. As the hits rack up in a turn, the damage multiplier rises from 100%->200%, making it prudent to cast a 5-hit shield first to help buff your Tengu's 450% x 1 Explosion. Some monsters act as secondary-DPSes via having high-hit attacks that, while dealing fair damage themselves, are primarily for buffing up the next monster's attack.

Capturing new monsters is simple, in contrast to Pokemon, where you are somehow not allowed to capture a fainted Pokemon. Bullshit, I say. Pikachu has 0HP -- he isn't going anywhere!

Anyway, after each battle, an egg of one of the monsters you have just defeated may drop, the chance of which is determined by the post-fight rating system. This evaluates you on how many turns you took, how much damage your monsters took, and overall execution. It's actually quite useful, both for reducing randomness in rare loot drops, and in helping you see if your current team is on-par.

Eggs can be hatched instantly, and will hatch at 2 levels below your strongest 'mon. Though there are evolutions (done through items rather than levels), evolutions are more side-grades rather than strictly upgrades; some even change entirely the role a monster is best-suited to play in a team. This is one of the game's great strengths, in that every monster remains viable throughout the entire game. Hatching new monsters is more of a question of whether they fit into your planned team-comp better rather than slotting them in for having strictly better stats/skills. I myself have used my first-area Magmapillar for the entire game so far.

Even better are the individual monster's skill-trees. I'll use my beloved Vasuki (who I hatched 15 minutes ago) as an example, so please do not laugh at me if my spec is all fucked up.

Here is the skill tree, and my attempt at an explanation.

I've decided on a debuff team centered around Poison/Burn/Weakness (note: debuffs/buffs are permanent), so I have gone down Vasuki's poison/fire branches. This includes passives like healing HP when an enemy takes poison damage, an attack that increases in strength/self-heal for each stack of poison on an enemy, and the double-knife icons are passives with a stacking 10% chance of a double-hit. This goes well with my Fungi's passive that allows poison to stack 3x, and my Magmapillar who spams shields to stall out the enemy.

In a different team, I might go down Vasuki's middle-tree to buff its considerable physical attack, or buff up other Reptile-class monsters. If going pure-tank, I might go down the fire-tree to passively generate shields on Burn damage, mass-heal allies and remove their debuffs, passively redirect attacks to itself, and "get poisoned if you attack me". All 3 seem similar in viability, especially given each monster has a choice between 2 mutually-exclusive passives.

This leads to wide diversity, not only in individual monsters, but in overall team-composition. Team Debuff is quite viable, but what seems most important is committing to an archetype and accepting that you can't do everything -- whether it's team debuff, team goblins, traditional tank/DPS/healer, 2 Buffers 1 DPS. Some negative reviews complain the game grows too difficult in its final area, though someone I know who has cleared the game on Master difficulty said those people need to 'git gud', because they cleared it with a ""sub-optimal"" tri-DPS comp with good team synergy.

Lastly, the trainer bossfights. Please enjoy the music.

These are very difficult, and are full-team battles that require your team on-level, well-equipped, and logically-built. If you are not running duplicate monsters, it's fun figuring out what different 3 monsters you can use that will nicely substitute for the initial 3, so as not to ruin your plan when 1 of them faints. And at least 1 will. Because these are seriously difficult: I usually win 2v1.

There are flaws to the game, but they seem few and minor. One is that respec items are trivial to buy in bulk, yet so cheap, one wonders why respecs aren't just free, especially in this game.

Secondly, like almost any RPG, the game is somewhat repetitive. Wild encounters are quick, yet I always know my plan with a particular team, so it sometimes feels as if I'm simply spamming the same sequence out until the bossfight, which then requires on-the-fly adaptation. And unlike in other games, you do need almost every wild encounter. They will not respawn, and you need the experience.

EDIT: Having now beaten the game with some adjustment to my debuff team (Crystal Snail ftw), flaw #3: the final boss is 2 fights and if you lose the 2nd you restart at the 1st. Thankfully, there are insta-win cheats to skip that.

The metroidvania elements are passable, and I have skipped every story dialogue. As for the monster designs, check a few out yourself - Catzerker especially feels 'classic' to me. I personally love a lot of the lil' guys, and the battle music is good too.

$10 until August 3rd -- that's a bargain.