Monster Train
Developer Shiny Shoe
Publisher Good Shepherd Entertainment
Format PC
Release Out now
They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery - in which case Slay The Spire’s makers must have blushed the deepest crimson at Monster Train. This is not the first game to hitch itself to Mega Crit’s deck-building Roguelike wagon, but it is comfortably the most successful. At its best, it feels not so much like a copycat as a spiritual sequel.
Many Spire ideas come over wholesale, albeit with tweaks to the vocabulary: Exhaust becomes Consume, Poison is rebadged as Frostbite, and so on. But for every design note Monster Train borrows, it adds several more, spread across the card pools of its five classes, styled as Clans. Synergies abound, many of them thrillingly absurd. STS is a work of austere purity; Monster Train is one of ravenous excess, a game that gives you the tools to break the game in half, and revels in it.