Nuumonsters

Overall, I would say this game is a 6/10, as a review for a casual player. If you can get it on sale and you're feeling curious, you could do far worse. However, I didn't buy this game to play casually, but rather to study it. I have an interest in making my own mon game at some point, and I know this creator went on to make Dokimon (which I intend to play later). I felt like it'd be helpful to see what might be achievable in my own first project, as well as what concepts do and don't work. I think I learned a lot in that regard. There's definitely some good ideas here, such as incorporating the ELO system into the actual progression. The combat is very simplistic but I did like the Burst system, even if it wasn't always clear when you can use it. Limiting switching to only cycling in the next mon in line seems arbitrary at first, but it did add some much needed strategy to the game. Also, while it's not really the kind of thing that could sell the game on its own, the attempt to emulate the feel of Pokemon Red/Blue's pixel art is a resounding success. Not to mention how being followed by a line of nuumonsters is absolutely adorable, and earning more followers over time ends up working surprisingly well. Autosave also came in handy... it ended up saving my run more than once, as you'll see. As an Early Access game, bugs are to be expected. The first one I found was a house where if you exit, it makes you come out of the door of a different house in the same town. Thankfully this wasn't too impactful. The worst bug however, was a cave that has nothing but blackness inside. Once you enter, you can't exit. If I'd saved in there, I might have had an unpickable softlock. The game also crashed more than once, usually when trying to pick up an item. Fortunately, the autosaves I mentioned meant I only lost a few minutes overall. Even beyond bug squashing, the game needs to make it easier to find where you're supposed to go next. It's not even immediately clear when the game has ended, since the lack of story means you just run out of places to unlock. The worst issue I found in regards to this was before the second elite. You need to buy a pickaxe, but if you end up spending all of the rest of your money on healing items before doing so, you'll have to grind for a good while before you can progress. There are even two other items in the shop, a mallet and a shovel, that don't seem to really do anything yet, giving you more things to accidentally waste money on. (The solution, from a game design perspective, is to avoid gating key items behind money, instead giving them through quests.) All of this could be forgiven if the combat system were deeper. Each nuumonster only has four possible moves. Not at one time: *four moves in its whole learnset.* I think the moves don't even have their own types: the types are all associated with the nuumonster. Unfortunately, even then the type chart isn't really intuitive, especially with more esoteric types like astral and fae. I ended up just avoiding resistances and brute forcing with neutral moves rather than memorize the best type to use in a given situation. I will give credit though that it feels surprisingly distinct from Pokemon. All that said, I'm glad I played it. I'm looking forward to the promised improvements and playing the game again in a completed state, so I can hopefully change my review to an actual recommendation.