The Haunted Hoard: Monstrum (Xbox One)

In the first-person horror game Monstrum, you find yourself the last human left alive aboard a ship adrift. The only other living thing aboard is a monster, but when you start a round, you won’t know what that monster might be. Until you encounter it yourself or find some clue, you won’t know which specific creature is hunting you down, and should it get its hands on you, it will immediately kill you, forcing you to restart with all progress lost and the monster randomized so you are again left in the dark on what you’re facing until another likely dangerous encounter. It’s easy to see why the idea would captivate some players, that true mystery of what you’re up against closer to the imagined reality of being trapped with some heretofore unknown entity, but Monstrum’s set up is unfortunately held back by quite a few other decisions about how this horror game manages that premise.

 

When you awake aboard the derelict vessel the Hisa Maru, you need to quickly set about finding a way to get off of it safely. However, the layout of the ship is not entirely consistent. While a few things are universal such as the amount of decks the ship has, where specific escape options are placed, and where you’d find a room like the ship’s bridge, other elements of the layout will be randomized to some degree with each attempt. Labyrinthine narrow halls will have the rooms they connect to shuffled around, this detail crucial because no matter what means you hope to use to escape the Hisa Maru, you will have to find items scattered all around the ship. Which rooms hold these vital items or other helpful tools will always be a complete mystery when you begin, meaning there is not much thought to scouring them beyond running about checking each one and hoping. This is a blatant attempt to give the monster time to hunt you down, the player unable to make a perfect escape plan and execute it because so much of your success is up to random chance, but it also makes most of the time you spend playing Monstrum a tedious scavenger hunt. Pop into a room, look all about, and pick up anything of value, provided your limited inventory space isn’t already cluttered. This will comprise of most of your time with Monstrum by necessity, with the three escape options all requiring multiple items to be made feasible before you even factor in other roadblocks to working towards success.

There is no way to truly fight back against the monsters of Monstrum, but there are some ways to trick or briefly delay them. Noise making tools will be the most likely to aid you well, things like glass cups and bottles you can throw to get its attention elsewhere or lure it into a place you quickly bolt away from. Radios and egg timers are a bit more interesting though, radios constantly making noise until the monster heads off to deal with it while egg timers activate on a delay so you can use it for strategies like making the monster break through a barricaded room you otherwise could not access. You can, if you’re lucky, sometimes find tools for slightly repelling the creatures too, like a fire extinguisher where a puff of foam will briefly stun them or a flare gun that can disorient them, although some of the horrors resist specific methods and particularly clever tricks like locking them in a room with a powered door and disabling the power only serve as temporary barriers as they’ll break free quickly. An almost clever means of distraction exists in using a phone to call another room on the ship to make the monster go to check that area, but the set-up needed and its distance from important areas often make it not worth the trouble. These tools and tricks are all almost vital in a way, because setting up escape methods like the helicopter or submarine inevitably make a good degree of noise, some means to keep the monster from showing up to kill you or, worse, destroying the means of escape, crucial to your success. In a better handled game, these would be effective options for overcoming the power difference between you and the beings stalking you with lethal intent, but you’re not guaranteed to find these or have the space to carry them, adding a lot of extra running about if you want to be equipped for interesting strategies.

 

The monsters themselves are of course an important component of this ineffective formula, and one of the first disappointments to be found is there are only three on offer. On the start of an attempt you won’t know which you’re facing and the game isn’t afraid to sometimes repeat one so you can’t even always expect it to cycle through the trio, but what makes the monsters unique isn’t actually that compelling. The creature depicted in the box art, known as The Brute, is pretty straightforward, its spotlight vision somewhat unique but otherwise it will charge you like they all do and if you try to hide beneath desks or beds, in cabinets, or within lockers, it may or may not find you as it searches rooms after losing sight of you. The other two monsters are a bit more unusual, the floating Fiend able to disable you from far away temporarily if it maintains sight on you while the Hunter stands out for being able to travel by vents or emerge from egg sacs it places around the ship. Each monster does have a somewhat effective tell so you know what you’re dealing with before you see it, it rather ominous to find an egg sac all of a sudden or see the purple tendrils crawling across your vision when the Fiend is trying to disable you from afar, and the noises they make can also clue you in so it’s possible to figure out who you’re dealing with when they’re not necessarily closeby.

While they do all look distinct, the Hunter unfortunately looking a bit gooey and unfinished compared to the more supernatural and withered look of the Fiend, much of the time, when in the same area as one, it’s just going to come down to trying to run away from them. This can have its issues, you’re inherently faster so that robs some of the tension, but also the room randomization can mean you go down a hall you didn’t know was a dead end only for the monster to appear when you go back and now have limited options for escape. There seems to be a bit of a grace period when the game starts so the monster isn’t immediately on top of you, but you won’t know what you might have when the first encounter occurs and it’s hard to reasonably predict when that might happen unless the monster has done something to give itself away. It’s just as likely you’ll turn a corner and find out the hard way, although with the Hunter that’s not even necessary as on more than one occasion she was able to kill me from around a corner before either of us should have been able to see the other. Monsters can clip through or into objects, sometimes to unfairly kill you despite you trying to use something like a cart to briefly block them, but even if they get stuck in a door, you won’t be able to guarantee they stay there, possibly leading to an unfortunate ambush after what seemed like a glitch in your favor. Overall though, much of the time, running and hiding as you’re being chased is the main means of interaction between you and your pursuer until something like a barricaded door requires a more involved interaction. At least when you’re trying to make your final escape it’s more tense, the monster’s ability to sabotage it meaning you might need to trick and lure the horrors more than usual while balancing whatever work is involved, some of it even requiring uninterrupted focus to add some heightened fear as you hope you can pull it off in time.

 

Monstrum does have some notes and audio logs to find that make broad gestures towards what might have gone down aboard the ship you find yourself aboard, too much specificity likely avoided since the three monsters are quite different and the game seemed to keep its options open while in early access development before wrapping up with only this small bunch. You won’t get a particularly satisfying backstory and even the escape is underwhelming, the endings focused more on your personal plight than anything deeper than that. Since notes are also randomized though, it’s hard to say you’ll even get a good picture, although they can at least all be referenced on the main menu later. Monstrum is almost purely an escape game though with little interest in broader pictures, but even if you only care for the gameplay, it’s hard to get invested in running randomized mazes and hoping you’ll eventually get a conducive arrangement of scattered items to making a successful escape.

THE VERDICT: There is certainly some potential in the idea behind Monstrum, the somewhat controlled randomization of the ship layout and the mystery of what monster you’re facing making each escape attempt come with some unease and tension as you wonder if you’ll be fit to face the creature you happen to be up against. Unfortunately, the monsters are mostly handled in a similar manner with their unique features not strong enough to make play sessions truly diverse, and when you look at what’s changing about the area you play in, it’s mostly just going to be items scattered about with you having to tediously search each room until you happen to have what you need. The lack of reliable item placement adds a sense of vulnerability but can also lead to you just being poorly equipped and almost doomed at times, Monstrum too much about repeatedly trying until the fates align that hampers the intended angle of it being an unpredictable and desperate bid for survival.

 

And so, I give Monstrum for Xbox One…

A TERRIBLE rating. When a monster catches you in Monstrum, it’s an instant kill, and everything you’ve done is reset. All knowledge of previous layouts is now useless, all items are gone, and this all can occur because you ended up in an unlucky spot or the Hunter decided solid steel walls didn’t matter when it comes to corners. This punishment is severe and one of the major reasons Monstrum doesn’t work, but that’s because it is an exceptionally poor companion to the item randomization. Monstrum does wisely have some rules in place like the general placement of the big escape options staying consistent, but then most everything else will be placed with little rhyme or reason. You can at least count on a barricaded room to have an important item, although with multiple escape options it might not be for what option seems most feasible to you on a run. More importantly, certain tools like fuses for activating powered doors and the like or useful tools for survival like a distraction item or defensive option are not only going to be wherever the whims of fate take them, but your inventory is severely lacking in space for them. This adds more reasons to tromp around the ship since you can’t carry everything you need unless you make sacrifices, and while encouraging some vulnerability isn’t a bad idea in a horror game, it just plays into Monstrum’s huge problem with just how monotonous regular play ends up being. You pop into rooms again and again, looking all over and hoping, and that’s all you really do until the monster starts to menace you, at which point even then it ends up mostly about fleeing and regrouping once you’ve shaken it with often very straightforward trickery. The monsters do feel like they needed to be better diversified, they’re mostly about one hit kills once they run up to you, but if they could have greater effects on the environment or have interesting behaviors like dragging an item around that you’d need to wrangle free from their grasp, they could have been better set apart and possibly more interactive. The item randomization though would need to be reined in so you’re not so helpless, and helplessness is the theme here, even when it’s just being unable to do much in the face of luck being the most important factor in whether an escape attempt might go smoothly.

 

Monstrum has its fans and its likely because the mystery inherent in jumbling all the parts of a horror game each round makes for some easy and effective terror. You can’t just look up exactly what to do or carry over your tools after a death, and that feels closer to how we imagine characters in a horror story truly being. It doesn’t work as well in practice when the actions you take to survive are so plain, limited in their logic, and still become repetitive after you’ve put in a few rounds to figure out how things work. However, it feels like maybe one day this formula could be done in a much better game, after which Monstrum will be swiftly forgotten in favor of an experience that did the premise justice. It can be exciting to be in a mysterious and perilous situation where you can’t be sure what lies ahead even after you’ve done this all before, but Monstrum isn’t robust enough to make the payoff as captivating as the imagined version of such a game. You can only pop into random rooms scouring for junk so many times before you realize things are technically different but still remarkably the same, Monstrum feeling like it came up with a neat idea but didn’t know how to put it into practice effectively.