Team Junkfish was kind enough to provide us with an Early Access code for its upcoming survival horror game, Monstrum, and below you can read our first impressions of it. In addition, you can view a 10-minute playthrough that will give you an idea of what this game is all about.
Monstrum is survival horror game that takes place in an abandoned ship. You wake up suddenly without remembering who or where you are. Soon, however, you realize that you are not alone in that ship. A monster is chasing. Your missions is quite simple; search the ship, avoid the monster, and escape the ship.
In its Early Access version, Monstrum comes with two types of monsters, and you will randomly encounter one of them during each of your playthroughs. The game features procedurally generated levels, as well as permadeath mechanics. This means that if you die, you’ll start over on a different ship.
You’ll be able to escape the ship via three ways. You can either use a helicopter, a submarine or a liferaft. And as you’d expect from such a game, you’ll have to search the ship in order to find tools with which you can fix/repair them.
Players can carry up to six different objects, meaning that they’ll have to choose their escape route from the beginning, search and find the appropriate tools that are needed to repair their vehicle.
Monstrum is powered by the Unity engine and graphics wise, there is nothing mind-blowing about it. Monstrum’s visuals get the job done, but they will not ‘wow’ you. As we’ve already said, this is an indie game so don’t expect breath-taking visuals.
But is it any fun? Well, that depends on the games you enjoy playing. Monstrum targets survival horror fans, as well as those that are not annoyed by ‘trial & error’ techniques. It can get annoying figuring out which tools are needed in order to repair your vehicles, but that’s part of the game’s main features.
Monstrum basically offers a ship that is your playground, with a minimal story and a monster chasing you. It can get quite tense, so this is definitely something that you should try if you are fans of this genre.
Enjoy!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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Nice, reminds me of Penumbra.
I just wanted to say the same:) and it means something good. Btw, about Penumbra dunno about you, but for me, even though I fully comprehend and appreciate the step forward in presentation, graphics and in some terms game mechanics and level design of Amnesia I still favor Penumbra greatly over the latter. The story and atmosphere were just so much better ihmo. What is ur opinion on that?
Oh yeah, I totally agree on that. It still is a great game and was such a breath of fresh air to the genre when it was released.
What baffles me is people comparing Monstrum to Alien Isolation… haven’t they played Penumbra??
Penumbra was a long time ago I guess. Anyways, this game looks decent, and in case it doesn’t live up to my expectations I can always go back to Penumbra once again:D I only wish I could repair my broken CRT or get a better LCD, since it is so important in these kinds of games to have a very good black color, without any backlight issues. I have a Dell U2412M and even on the lowest brightness, in pitch black darkness it is not perfect, since as you remove sources of light from your room the relative effect of the backlight increases. A good setting in a game is when you can only see a few meters around you without a light source. Once I made a perfect setup for Thief and it was glorius, I could see complete darkness, and go into it, then my eyes irl adapted to it, oh god it was so perfect:D but also game developers should look into this, since extremely low brightness can ruin some games real bad.
This game should have Oculus Rift support too. With this it can be really interesting.
It does have Rift support or at least it did. I played this at EGX Rezzed where they where demoing the game with the Rift.