The Monster Within
ABOUT THIS GAME
Monsters roam the streets of the city, including you! Fight off sinister creatures while stopping yourself from turning into one too in this deck building card game. Craft a unique deck each round from Day cards, Night cards, and Monster cards. Do you try to stay above board and beat your opponents through clever investigation and tactics, use the seeder underbelly of the city to your advantage, or embrace your burgeoning evil instincts? Or maybe mix a bit of all three! Pick one of six different classic monsters to play as. Unlock new cards and characters as you play, unlocking more and more playstyles and strategies. Themed after 1950’s horror comics, build the story of your battle with the cards you play.
In classic deck building fashion, buy cards to use to damage your opponent, protect yourself, or just buy even better cards in the future. Over two hundred cards to play with and unlock.
Take your pick of monsters each with their own cards and strategy. Feed on your foes blood as the Vampire, embrace the night as a the Wraith, make your opponents green with envy as the Plant, crush them with sheer bulk as the Blob, and more!
As you loose health, you become more and more monstrous and the cards you can buy change. Keep your health high to stay in the Day, or intentionally let it slip to gain powerful Monster cards. Just don’t let yourself fully lose control to the monster within!
Fangs, Scaly Skin, Mysterious Secretions, take your pick of Afflictions each round to power up your character and find new strategies to win. What’s a little inhumanity when it comes with such power?
Use the Blood system to make the game more difficult the more you play it. The harder it is, the faster you’ll unlock more content.
The Monster Within is fully playable, with an expansive amount of content already. But it’s not quite expansive enough, Since only six of the ten planned monsters are available to play, the game is still in early access. More monsters, more cards, and the fourth and fifth round with dual class monsters and the final boss are all coming soon, free of charge. Just buy the game now and you’ll have access to all the upcoming content as it comes out with no additional purchases necessary. So get in there and show the competition why you’re the meanest monster around!
Game Discussion
Steam User 73
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The Monster Within is a roguelite deck-builder with a 50's horror comic theme.
Atmosphere
Thanks to the 50's horror comic theme, the well-selected music, and the great artwork, the atmosphere is just on point. It's very well done, the "story" (short comic strips) is good enough considering the genre but nothing special. The characters are stereotypes but even that just fits the game perfectly. Usually, the atmosphere is just a small sentence below my arguments for "the good" below but because it is so great, it deserves to be praised more!
Battles
How battles work is very unique. Each character starts with the same set of cards. As the battle goes on, you will be able to get more and individual cards into your deck.
How does that work?
Well, aside from "Attack" and "Block", cards can stack a resource called "Day". Each turn you draw five cards and play ALL of them. In fact, it's almost required to play all cards (at least in the beginning). Every card played will be part of a comic. At the top of the screen, there is a store. Each turn, there are four different cards to buy. You need resources to buy them. Each card shows which and how much of that resource you need.
The more health you lose, the stronger your cards get. At one point, you will be able to stack "night" as a resource. With that, you can buy stronger cards. The next resource is called "monster" and the strongest of them all. With every new resource, new cards appear in the store.
If you get the enemy down to 0HP, he will turn into a monster and gets much stronger. Now, you can't buy cards anymore but every resource you stack counts as an attack from now on.
A run
Consists of several fights. After each fight, you can swap themes (Set of cards able to be bought during battles) and get new traits. To get traits, you need to sacrifice some HP. For example, you can get a trait letting you live after reaching 0HP till you get -25HP, another one will give you a bonus attack after playing three attack cards, etc.
Characters
Each character has a different lock and a starting trait. The first one is a vampire. If you play a "Feed" card, a timer will go up. Each time spending another feed card, it will go one down. Another character has "growth" as a mechanic. You will be able to get his growth up by playing special cards. With a bigger growth, you can get better cards at the store as well as play cards that synergize with this mechanic (+X attack, while X is the number next to "Growth").
Progression
You can unlock nine more characters, each with a special trait. That and card packs are the only things unlockable in the game. Doesn't sound that much but it's definitely enough. You can also unlock new difficulty modifiers to make runs harder. It's also worth noting that each character has its comic strips so this also serves as a kind of progression if you want to complete that.
The Good
Battles are tactical demanding and very unique. Mechanics surrounding the resources and how you get them as well as new cards allow you to use different strategies. It also has some kind of progression to work towards within battles.
The atmosphere is astonishing.
There is enough progression to make it engaging.
The Bad
Battles are very long and the start of EVERY battle is the same and it's boring. I think making it more unique (different starting decks) would be a good idea to make it more fun and diverse. It's also just too easy. Especially in the beginning, there is no way to bring ANY strategy or tactic into battles. You just play ALL the cards you have and hope for the best because well, your cards don't allow for any other playstyle. Even acquiring your first few or even dozens of cards doesn't change much of that. This changes when you get to the next resource (Night) because these cards allow for much more strategy but still, it takes a few minutes to get to that point because enemies do like 1-3 damage for several turns while you have around 100HP.
Conclusion
The Monster Within is a fun indie game. The atmosphere is just astonishing, the music fits the theme very well and the comic style is great. The beginning is very rough, battles start boring and are always the same while taking too long overall. Later, battles get tactical demanding, and fun but till then, it's a long walk.
I recommend buying The Monster Within on a sale if you're into roguelike deck-builder.
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Steam User 16
Inexpensive, quirky and creative, Monster Within brings a slew of novel elements to the deckbuilding genre. While so many others tend to chase after mechanics similar to MTG, Monster Within makes itself known with a unique transformation system and myriad monster-specific mechanics that dramatically shift how the game plays.
Of course, this isn't the creator's first game - indeed, they have a previous card game with very similar mechanics - called TF Card Battle. Released in 2018 it is more or less a direct predecessor to Monster Within, albeit extremely NSFW and completely free. The creator has been plinking away at the fundamental concepts that form this game ever since and, honestly, I found myself playing it way too often for the engaging gameplay over abundant debauchery than I'd care to admit.
So, should you get it right now? I think so. Only about 1/3rd of the expected content is present at the moment, but it's also dirt-cheap and the developer has been releasing updates for a free game for over three years now, so I have no doubt it'll get there in the end. It's a good way to support an indie dev who genuinely deserves it.
Steam User 15
Came from tf card battle which is a NSFW origin as far as I can tell, but this is a fairly interesting deck builder system that only got better with the comic style it adopted.
So The monster within (TMW) is a game where you play cards to get resources, which you used to buy cards to protect, damage , or get more resources as needed. And every turn the enemy would attack you for X - Y damage. If you win the battle you get to pick a passive. And as you're health lowers you buy pile/resources gain start shifting from human to night to monster.
PROS:
This game differs massively from other games because the resources you're focusing on changes as you take more damage. making defense cards much much more valuable. And you get a lot of flexibility for how high/low risk you want to take.
Also while basic the comic artstle is stylish as fuck.
Cons:
Enemies are basic. they don't do much.
There's probably a fair amount of polishing for the UI but I'll give it a pass since in it EA
Steam User 8
The Monster Within is a deckbuilding game that oozes atmosphere. The art and music are excellent and do a great job of putting you in the setting.
Admittedly, there are a lot of deckbuilders. So, what does this game bring to the deckbuilder genre other than a fantastic theme? First, the cards you can choose to buy are dictated by your health. The lower your health, the more powerful cards you can buy - but, of course, the closer you are to losing. This mechanism feels really good, especially because the rounds go a little longer than most deckbuilders. Which brings up something else different about The Monster Within - The longer rounds allow you to really build your deck around a theme and capitalize on that theme. The third thing that sets this game apart is that the developer is extremely responsive - seriously. Join the discord and have your bugs taken care of pronto.
The game has a good amount of replay value for what you pay for it and each class feels unique and makes you want to experience all of them. That being said, in the games current state there definitely isn't a LOT of replay value. The story is given by short witty comic strips, which is enough for this type of game but don't go into it expecting to become engrossed by the plot. The only other weakness of the game is, like other reviewers have said, the early parts of each game can get a bit repetitive but after those parts the games do have a fair amount of variance, even within the same class.
Overall, it's a cheap and well-balanced deckbuilder with a great developer. If you like deckbuilding games, I'd recommend giving this one a go.
Steam User 5
The Monster Within is a rougelite deck builder with fresh twist. The mechanic of having your buy pile linked to your health not only changes up the formula from other deck builders, but also makes learning challenging and rewarding wile unlocking new things. For new players, the game might seem easy and a even little broken, but that's because at the higher difficulty's the game gets much harder and rewards stringing card combos together. For returning player familiar with this games previous iteration, this isn't just an old game with a new skin. With a slightly new game flow, different card ability's, and a tutorial that's MUCH easier to understand, this is well worth the purchases.
Steam User 3
Great deck builder game!
I played it on stream and had a blast. If you enjoy deck building games in the vein of Star Realms you will definitely enjoy this one! I would say it even goes deeper in terms of mechanics, adding a lot of depth and customization to your play style in the form of card upgrades, character traits and even different characters altogether.
As it stands it's excellent, I am actually surprised that it's on early access. I would love perhaps someday in the future if the game could be adapted for pvp, thought it may not be possible.
I would definitely recommend this game! Buy it, play it, it's good!
Steam User 3
"The Monster Within" is a very fun deckbuilding game that manages to find a good balance between strategic gameplay and thematic elements.
The variety of different monsters and card sets enables the player to pick their favorite cards and strategies, while the blood level system ensures that they can choose their appropriate difficulty level. I can recommend this game to players that are experienced in cards game, as well as those who wish to give it a try. This is especially true for anyone who likes the theme of fighting a monster within you... or accepting it.