Monstrum

You wake up. You have no idea what happened. All you know is that you need to escape from this place you're trapped in, and you need to find out just what happened there. However, you must look out for the strange things wandering the halls of this abandoned sea-faring vessel and avoid them to survive your stay on the ship.

Monstrum is a game developed Team Junkfish and is a rogue-like survival horror -a unique little mixing of genres to be sure. Rogue-likes have become very popular as of late in gaming, but typically they come in the form of platformers with a more Metroidvania-like feel, but Monstrum is a game that likes to break it's way out of the "normal" horror game box. The thing about Rogue-likes is that once you die, you're dead permanently, and you're sent right back to the beginning similar to classic NES and SNES games, which is a good way to make the player think smarter on their feet.

You need to be actively aware of your surroundings throughout the whole game, or you might just die. While it can be frustrating to have all of your progress erased from the map and to go back and collect those submarine parts all over again, Monstrum does have some mercy. There are collectables you can get throughout the game, which come in the form of logs recorded by other people on the ship, that tell what happened before the player woke up. Luckily those don't go away after every brutal death, which means you don't have to go diving through the ship looking for those again. The main objective of the game is to escape the evil haunted death ship via submarine or helicopter, but you have to fix them first by finding the parts or cutting it loose. When you die, however, all of your parts will disappear and you'll have to find them all over again. The issue some might have with that is that they are in completely different places every single time. Monstrum is a procedurally generated game which means that things are different every single time, the only thing that is the same is your main objective of collecting submarine parts without dying.

Speaking of dying, there is a menagerie of things that can kill you in this game. Some monsters pay homage to other horror works, like the worm monster that attaches to your face in a very Alien-esque way, but most are of the teams own design. The graphics in the game reflect the decrepit and derelict feeling the ship is supposed to have, and it also shows up in the monsters as well. They look as if they've been there for a while, which adds to the atmosphere the game is trying to build. It tries to make you feel as if you’re on the ship with the protagonist and are trying to escape with him. The monsters look somewhat rusted in a way, and end up truly terrifying when they do find you. And when they find you, you can't fight them off.

Much like it's elder indie sibling Outlast, you have to hide from the monsters that threaten you, which means there's nothing to do but run, throwing things to get them to think you went in another direction and then finding a good place to hide. Monsters aren't the only thing that can kill you in Monstrum, far from it: there are various environmental hazards that can spawn and be out for your blood, the strangest of these being steam. While it is completely possible to be killed by steam in real life, it is a little surprising to find your character suddenly scalded by steam and that being your cause of death. Environmental hazards are likely to kill you if you aren't paying attention to your surroundings, so it's best to pay full attention when you're playing this game. Certain things will give you time to react, but others won't, meaning there are a few deaths that will seemingly come out of nowhere, but if you were paying attention that wouldn't have happened.

Each death has a unique game over screen to show just how badly your character was mutilated or what just killed you. This means you'll never be at a loss, scratching your head trying to figure out just how you got killed by the squiggly white thing. The game is not for someone who will just rush through it blindly, because if you do there will be dire consequences. Monstrum is a game you have to take your time with in order to fully enjoy, and may not fit with every person’s play style. If you're the type who likes to blaze through games, this isn't what you'll be looking for and if anything, it'll just get you frustrated. That's part of what makes this game as fun as it is, because you never have the same experience twice.  It'll always be different which gives the game a lot of replay value – if you ever beat the game that is.

Monstrum is a fun, frightening horror game that takes its audience out to the middle of the ocean on a rusted ship and repeatedly murders them, and we wouldn't have it any other way. It knows its audience and it knows that the game itself will attract the right kind of people to it, those who like a good horror game that will improve throughout its time on early access.

Angelina Bonilla, NoobFeed (@Twitter)