Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off the weekend by taking a look at the world of gaming, diving in to the ideas that underpin the hobby we love with a bit of Game Theory. We’ll sound off in the space above, and invite you to respond down in the comments, telling us what you’re playing this weekend, and what theories it’s got you kicking around.
The danger of writing about a really good video game is that you first have to play the really good video game; the danger of playing a really good video game, meanwhile, is that you’re often in peril of having too much fun to actually stop and write about the damn thing.
Did that make sense? Apologies if not—I’ve been up way too late this week playing Monster Train 2.
Shiny Shoe’s follow-up to its compulsive 2020 deckbuilder is, on the face of things, not that much different from the original: You’re still the designated bodyguard for an infernal train making its way through heaven, deploying monsters and spells to keep those dang angels—now corrupted by the “Titans,” in a pretty classic demons/angels/squid cosmological split—from blowing up the big glowing rock you’re trying to transport. You still split your time between fighting turn-based battles and managing your deck, picking different train tracks filled with upgrades to go hurtling down after every fight. And, yes, you still try not to look too hard at the art (although you now also need to not look too hard at the writing, because Monster Train has writing now, for some reason), and instead focus on incredibly beefy strategic gameplay that encourages you to break it as quickly and as efficiently as possible in order to keep yourself alive.
Monster Train 2 is, in other words, a classic example of an iterative sequel: The kind of game you get when a developer comes up with an idea, releases it into the world, and then uses the resultant feedback to make something, if not better, then at least more. (And to be clear, I do think Monster Train 2 is generally a better game than its predecessor—but the “more” aspect comes first.) In Monster Train‘s case, that generally means more complexity. If the base game, with its set of five “clans” that could be mixed and matched in various configurations, was already an exercise in managing decision paralysis, the sequel ups that factor considerably. Freedom can, after all, be the freedom to fuck yourself over, and Monster Train 2 offers that particular liberty in abundance.
That’s especially true in the early going, as the game tosses a ton of new mechanics at players with its two starter clans, both of which sort of loosely riff on archetypes from the first game. The Banished (“2005-era webcomic angels” in my notes) focus on creating Valor, a resource that buffs both a unit’s attack and its survivability, as long as you’re keeping the little guys moving. And the Pyreborne (“cash dragons”) rely on making big money and applying pyregel, a new status effect that’s essentially a more complicated kind of poison, triggering every time an enemy gets hit. Each of these effects is just conditional enough to fire off that it’s likely to jam up your brain in the early going; my first several runs with the game saw my confidence Wile E. Coyote off a cliff pretty abruptly as a strategy I thought was sure-fire success suddenly slammed into a wall of screeching eyeball angels. (The addition of a new “undo” button that lets you replay the current turn helps walk back more immediate mistakes, but there’s no “undo” for a screw-up you made with an upgrade 20 minutes earlier that’s only now snowballing into lethality.)
This is all a natural outgrowth of Monster Train‘s biggest conceptual obsession: Breakability. (Or maybe “synergy,” if you want to get more smart-words about it.) Strip away the mushroom monsters and the DeviantArt mad scientists and the thicc dragon ladies, and what you’re left with when you look at the game is an incredibly complex web of rules, most of which you can tweak in some way through upgrades or smart card combinations to bend them to your advantage. (It’s by design that many of the game’s spells and units have some big obvious downside—a high cost, taking up too much space in your train, etc.—which you can essentially patch out by applying the right upgrades to them.) Monster Train 2 is, basically, “Monster Train but with more rules,” which means that the complexity, and the ability to exploit that complexity, has increased by a geometric degree. (The addition of equipment that can be applied to your units, often with run-changing implications, is another factor exponentializing the possibilities.) Figuring out how these rules rub up against each other, and then finding the spots where one can be bent and then broken to output huge damage numbers, is the great pleasure of the game. (Insert mandatory 2025 games writing Clair Obscurreference here, since that title also prides itself in letting you do dopey things to make the numbers very high.)
This process is intensely addictive, even if it can also feel paradoxically limiting at times. (Because once you’ve discovered something that feels like an optimal strategy, it can be very difficult to break yourself free of the desire to employ it.) Lately, I’ve been trying to overcome that rut tendency by rolling random combinations of clans just to see what sort of weird interactions pop out of the machine, and, 22 hours in, I feel like I’ve barely scratched the game’s surface. (It feels much larger than Monster Train 1, just by dint of the sheer number of combinations available.) Sometimes, this experimentation can be deeply demoralizing—Shiny Shoe knows what its game can do when players go nuts on it, so it’s very comfortable tossing roadblocks at the player that can bring a whole run to a grinding halt if you’re not ready for them—but it’s still one of the most compulsive gaming experiences of the year so far.
