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Monster Within is a Roguelike Deckbuilder. It is the first game made by GMO Free Studio and I bought this one on a whim, thinking this could be the next hidden gem perhaps. Not the best purchase but not the worst either. There are plenty of things that I felt made this game unique to play and there are also plenty of problematic designs, which make this game interesting to analyze. 

Monster Within Analysis

Game Structure: A run would typically look like this:

1. Pick a character and difficulty level
2. Pick an Affliction and swap themes
3. Fight Monster (1)
4. Upgrade theme, pick an affliction, and swap themes
5. Fight Monster (2)
6. Upgrade theme, pick an affliction, and swap themes
7. Fight Monster (3)
8. Win the run.

The structure of the game is simple, functional, and most importantly, unique. Recently I tried out a few Roguelike deckbuilders on Android, and many of them use the Slay the Spire model with the same variation of frost and fire power themes. Monster Within feels a lot more original in comparison. There are fewer fights, but each fight is longer, which is different from the short fights and nodes traveling format that more roguelike deckbuilding games tend to use.

A unique deck-building process: You start every game with a default deck of Resource Points + a few basic attack points, and then you use that resource to buy cards from the shop. The cards from the shop will offer four cards each round with the themes of your choice. The cards have abilities that allow you to attack, block, make potions, draw cards, and etc. You then use these cards to fight against the monsters to win. This deck-building process is exactly how Dominion / Tanto Cuore works, but it is used now in a different context. 

Ideally, with this deckbuilding and store system, every game should feel different since there is RNG involved in the store. However, since this game can last ~40 rounds and there are ~20-25 cards in the pool for “Day” with 4 options to buy, it feels like it is quite easy to build a consistent deck every game. Being able to play each game with unique strategies is preferable, although I cannot say that that is the case for Monster Within for sure due to low hours of playtime. 

Day/Night/Monster system: Depending on your health, you are either in Day, Night, or Monster mode, sometimes in between. If you have 100 health, all the cards in your store will be ones that cost Day resource to purchase. However, once your health gets lower, your default deck of resource cards gradually gives you Night resources instead and the store also starts selling Night cards, which can shake up your strategy. 

Character: You can play as 10 unique monsters (characters) in the game and you fight these same characters in-game as well. Each monster has its unique cards and themes that you can buy at the store. They also feel different as some benefit more from being at Day vs. being at Night, this will affect the kinds of afflictions you choose to take. The nurse, for example, gets her signature cards with Feed at night. The Plant really likes the day, while the Mad Scientist has a lot of potion synergy cards at night. Characters = relatability in looks and personalities, unique gameplay and strategies, new experiences. 

Blood level (Difficulty): You can choose to increase the difficulty of the game whenever you defeat the highest difficulty mode you are at currently. It gives players new challenges and incentives to play again as the player becomes more skilled. 

Blood level three really showcases the competency of the developers in my opinion. Card draw is extremely strong in this game, when abused to the extreme, I would be able to draw my entire deck every single round consistently. Blood level three is when the amount of pages in the comic book is limited to 40 pages per round, and you take damage at the end of the round = # of lost pages. In other words, if I play ~4 cards per turn, I would almost always only use 1 page. But if I play ~25 cards per turn, I would use 6 pages per round. 

It is a design choice that feels like a double-edged sword: On one hand, I believe it is a great implementation because it makes the card draw as a mechanic feel more balanced and promotes other ways of playing the game, such as utilizing the theme of Brutality that gives you huge resources if you haven’t drawn extra cards. 

However, this design also makes the game feel much slower and directly contradicts one of their own inventions: Play Simple. The cards with resources of “1 Day”, “1 Attack”, it can feel slow and annoying to drag them from your hand to the play. The feature of “Play simple” makes the pacing of the game feel much faster so that the player can focus on playing cards that require decision-making instead of wasting efforts on the not-so-important parts of the game. Blood level three changes that, since comic book pages can range from four to nine cards if I click on play simple, it means that I might end up wasting the precious space to play mediocre cards, which would result in me potentially losing one page for using a feature that is supposed to make my runs feel smoother. This feature makes me hesitant on wanting to play another run, I guess this contradicts my own point of this being a good design… 

Upgrade theme: One of the packs of cards you have will permanently be upgraded for the rest of the run. All cards in that theme will now cost less or give you extra resources. It serves as a reward for winning and that feels good. 

Affliction: You can sacrifice your max HP to get new powers. Nurse as an example loves to sacrifice afflictions so that she can start the game at ~ 50 HP. With the day/night/monster system, she can start the game at night, which allows her access to more of her powerful theme cards. Affliction choices are random, which will make runs feel varied. However, some strategies prefer that their HP is at 100 and since “don’t take anything” is always an option, those strategies can feel more consistent and perhaps dull. 

Is Monster Within Fun?

Abusing card draw as a strategy feels really good and powerful. However, the ones with basic attacks and shields can feel really underwhelming and useless, especially the low-cost ones, the ones in the “Technology” pack. The characters feel different and unique to one another and it is fun trying out new ones. 

I think a big design feature I have yet to discuss is this: Your basic resource cards change automatically depending on your health. This is a good design because it fits the theme and fantasy of your character gradually losing sanity as they lose health. 

The execution of this design is good, but not good enough as of the time I wrote this piece because of this: The shop doesn’t always reflect your basic automated resource pool. There was a game where I played as a Nurse and started the game at around 50 HP. My deck was filled with Night resource cards, but the shop only had Monster resource cards. The result was that for the first few turns, I had absolutely nothing that I could do to build a functional deck and deal damage. This is the point of the game where I just quit and started a new run on a completely different character. 

This design problem has heavy implications for affliction as well. Taking damage to get a new power and reach Night/Monster quicker is supposed to feel good, but now I avoid them because I don’t want to get into a game and feel completely powerless right off the bat. Thus, I spent my past 1.5 hours of playtime on the Mad Scientist who would benefit from buying potions during Day. 

There is also no option to remove cards from the deck. This makes it harder to feel that I am becoming more powerful as the game goes on. Plus, while the current “basic resources reflect your current health” works sometimes, I would much rather have the ability to draw my more powerful cards. In fact, there are more basic resource cards shuffled into my deck as the game goes on(?) because, in my post-game deck UI, it showed me that I had ~20 basic resource cards while I began the game with 10 basic resource cards. This mechanic is not well explained anywhere I believe. 

My run for Monster Within feels like feast or famine. I can’t say the same about other roguelike deckbuilders such as “Tavern Rumble'' and “Slay the Spire.” With blood level three, I am struggling and it feels like famine only, but when I think about it harder, I think there are ways to overcome the current challenges and I look forward to trying again sometime. 

What matters is this: The game is unique at least and its polish is good enough for me to recommend this game, although the price can be a bit too expensive right now in my opinion. I find Circadian Dice, the completely free Roguelike dice builder game I played months ago to be more fun and rich in strategy than this one. 

To wrap things up, I will discuss some features briefly I have yet to discuss since they seem smaller. 

• The tutorial can be better but it doesn’t take long to get used to the game since it is relatively simple. 
• The cutscenes in between a fight do their job, the writing is kind of cheesy so I skip them most of the time and the “comic” is just the same expression.jpg pasted onto different panels, but I don’t mind. 

• The boss fight mechanic is executed pretty well. It makes use of the store UI to give you information regarding your opponent’s attack. This can be problematic as without shops, your basic resources are completely useless since you cannot use them to buy cards anymore. However, this design problem is then solved when during the boss fight, you deal damage = resource + attack. This would mean that cards such as gaining Night = your current Day can be hyper-powerful in the right deck builds and circumstances. 
• The comic book system: Your cards take a space in the comic book. It looks good and cool, although this feature felt completely useless in the strategy aspect for the first four hours of the game until Blood level three (not a bad thing since no other card games display the cards you play, just wish that it was better). 
• My idea is this: What if cards in comic book panels can give you bonuses? Such as certain panels becoming “Climax” panels where you get double the resources? This feature would really destroy the “play simple” feature and make the game a lot slower in pace, despite making the player feel more powerful (also ignoring how difficult this could be set up). Point is, I would love it if there are some ways where there is a better fit between the “comic book aesthetics”, “strategy implications” and “gameplay feel” would be nice.