Do you ever get a craving for those colourful, 2D pixel art games from the SNES, GBA and early Nintendo DS era? Because I know I sometimes do. Let me introduce you to Monster Sanctuary.
At its heart, this game is another monster-collecting RPG. What sets it apart from many of its competitors, is, that it's a Metroidvania title - meaning that you will need to acquire certain monsters and items to access new areas in this 2D world - and it features a battle system which revolves heavily around passive monster abilities, buffs and debuffs. You know, like that "Howl" move you've never used in Pokemon.
Since you always bring three monsters into battle at the same time, using complementary skills is the key to victory. For example, one monster might apply the "Sorcery" buff with one specific ability, while another allows "Sorcery" to be stacked up to 3 times. Attacks also grow stronger the more "hits" you've landed in the same turn. This makes it important to decide the order in which every monster attacks.
Monster Sanctuary starts off kind of easy, but grows fairly difficult in late game. When even the randomly encountered monsters spawn at the game's max level, it all comes down to how well you can combine your monsters.
The world design as well as the monster design is a bit hit-and-miss. While some I find truly unique and interesting, others just leave me wondering "Why this?".
Likewise, the music is nothing to write home about, but if you happen to get annoyed by the battle music, you can switch to a different track in the options. Actually, more RPGs should have such a feature, just to mix up random encounters a bit.
The only downside to this game is that it gets repetitive fairly quickly. Most of the time you will face random encounters that, if you play your monsters well, are not too difficult, and, if you already have obtained the enemy monsters, not too rewarding, either. Besides the occasional puzzle room and a very simple upgrading system for your equipment, this game has little to offer in terms of gameplay variety, and neither the story, nor its characters are very intriguing, either.
To avoid repetition, I recommend playing the game only for a little while whenever, and if you do not have the time for long gaming sessions and miss collecting pixel art monsters, perhaps you will find Monster Sanctuary to be your lucky pick.
PS: There's me saying "I recommend playing only for a little while", and then there's me trying to beat the same boss for three hours straight before wondering what I am doing with my life.
Can’t wait for the day that makers of retro pixel-art games realize that also including retro pixel-art fonts is accessibility bullshit and they need to stop fucking doing it you ignorant stupid assholes.
It's fun to work with the color limitations of the NES, and also I'm a sucker for all-black UIs.
I made a font that matches the modern sans-serif style of the original but still fits into the one-letter-per-tile scheme, and I really like how it turned out.
Artist note: I’m so proud of this :))) I know it’s a lot of dialogue and reading, but dialogue is grueling work for me. I’m glad with the art and for the amount of pages I made in such a relatively short time span -w- page 5 was super fun to work on. A lot of blood, sweat, and hours here... :) The backgrounds were a big bore tbh, but I finished them! Yippie!
Lana Del Rey pixel art "horror" game interaction (2/3) 🌹
The first option against her would be "Choose last words", as she says in her song "Born To Die", and that would mean to give up the fight.
(I'm practicing animation with this, not a real game, it's just for fun)