A Monster's Expedition

A Monster’s Expedition is an open-world block-pushing game about a merry monster rolling logs around to explore a museum of human culture. Through spatial visualization and logical deduction, you’ll need to maneuver logs into the correct positions to build bridges between islands. These simple mechanics offer surprising depth, with interactions discovered later in the game allowing you to explore hidden paths earlier on in the game’s massive open-world archipelago.

The core mechanics are simple: your monster character moves around on the grid and, when you push into a tree, will topple that tree to create a log. Logs can be pushed end-over-end, but when a log is pushed on its rounded side it will continue rolling until it hits an obstacle or falls in the water. This combination of movement rules is used to create parity puzzles, where the challenge is in manipulating logs into the right orientation in a particular row or column of the grid.

A Monster’s Expedition continues expanding on these base mechanics in elegant ways, using very few new puzzle components. Perhaps most notably, after one hour or so, the game introduces rafting, which adds an additional layer of navigation and routing challenges to the game. Often, the puzzles are not simply about moving logs around, but also understanding exactly how you’ll use those logs to navigate to the next island.

These simple mechanics offer surprising depth, with many areas of the game revealing new ways to interact with the basic mechanics that were possible all along, if only you had known how. Players looking for optional challenges and secret objectives can take their newfound knowledge and apply it to earlier areas, finding new routes between islands that they had missed on their first pass through.

The game is light in story or narrative, but features plinths scattered throughout the archipelago as part of a museum of human culture. Where have the humans gone? Who knows, but there’s certainly lots of water around. These museum exhibits feature various artifacts from human society along with what are presumably humorous misinterpretations from the perspective of the monsters that discovered them.

This description was written by Joseph Mansfield and edited by Oriane Tury.