Monster Train

Monster Train builds on the wave of roguelike deckbuilders kicked off by Slay the Spire, but adds its own key mechanic — combat doesn't take place on a single plane, but across several floors of a vertical train carrying hell's last flame to safety. The player builds their deck from two different clans (demons, reptiles, gravediggers, and others) whose cards can be combined into unexpected synergies, and must decide which of the train's floors to station their units on, since enemies advance from the bottom floor toward the core, which must be protected at all costs.

This spatial layout of the battlefield gives Monster Train a unique extra tactical layer compared to standard one-card-versus-one-card card combat — the player must consider not just the strength of the cards, but also exactly where on the train to place them in order to take advantage of terrain bonuses, protect vulnerable units in the back, and still prevent the enemy from breaking through to the heart of the flame. Each clan also brings a powerful champion unit around which an entire deck synergy can be built, and the combination of two clans at once allows for an enormous variety of different builds and strategies, which, together with the permadeath mechanic, ensures the high replayability typical of the entire roguelike deckbuilder genre.

The game also excels visually thanks to its striking, darkly stylized graphics and atmospheric music that reinforces the hellish setting of the story about the last spark of hell's flame carried by the train upward to the surface, where a variety of bosses with their own special combat rules await the player. The game also includes a system of difficulty levels (Covenant), which gradually adds handicaps and forces the player to seek out ever more effective strategies even after completing the base campaign. After its release in 2020, Monster Train was received exceptionally well by critics, and it convinced a number of players and reviewers that it could compete with — and in some respects even complement — the genre's established pioneer, which made it one of the most acclaimed titles of its kind on PC and later on consoles as well.

Why play it: For fans of roguelike deckbuilders looking for a worthy rival to the genre's pioneer, with a striking dark atmosphere and a difficulty system for long-term replayability.