A Monster’s Expedition

After having built his snowmen and driven aliens to every corner of the galaxies, our little Draknek monster protagonist embarks on a journey through islands and archipelagoes, a giant museum containing items and “knowledge” about the human culture.
A Monster’s Expedition is a sokoban puzzle game : if you’ve played A Good Snowman is Hard to Build, well this game is really similar but in a much more ambitious and well done way.

The game has no explicit goal (though there is an end), you follow the paths you discover and learn about those human artifacts. All the exhibitions are funny and show the misunderstandings of the monsters, there’s nothing serious and you’ll actually laugh reading them.

Each island is a puzzle. There are trees on them that you can flip, push, roll etc and you need to create a path to the next islands. Each archipelago usually has two paths you can take : an easy one and a normal one. The first puzzle of the easy path is a pure tutorial and teaches you what the special mechanic of the archipelago is going to be. That’s very casual-friendly, you can just enjoy the adventure and the relaxing atmosphere if you want.
Sometimes you can build rafts that let you travel to other areas, and that’s how you progress. Considering the tiny size of the islands, their number and the simplicity of the mechanics, the game does a very good job in keeping you interested.

The world is indeed huge, with hundreds of islands and dozens of exhibitions. It’s also very open with various paths you can take, the game isn’t linear.
However, some people might have trouble with that : if you’re not methodical, you can get confused and lost I guess. The gigantic number of islands also means that puzzles are not always unique and it can feel a bit redundant.

So yes, this game is very good, but why did I give it such a high rating? From what I’ve written until now, it clearly doesn’t deserve a 4.5/5.

Well let’s talk about the other side of the game. Once again, if you’ve played A Good Snowman is Hard to Build, you know what to expect once the adventure is finished.
You see, during your adventure everything is shrouded in fog, and the fog is lifted once you discover a path or an island. The fog covering the unreachable areas of the map is also lifted once you reach the end, and that’s where the true game begins. Even the most methodical people like me will be stunned to see how many paths and islands they completely missed during their adventure. And that’s totally normal.

Those islands you’ll probably miss all have a snowman on them that you can hug : the hell of the 60 meta puzzles can begin.
To reach the snowmen, you need to study the map and the islands around it. Then you have to bring trunks from an island onto another, build rafts using trunks from several islands etc… I didn’t use any hints but there is an option to show you which islands need to be used in order to solve those meta puzzles if you really need it.
You’ll probably get a few of the snowmen during the adventure but a lot of them are very hard and clever. Some of them are amongst the hardest puzzles I’ve solved in any game, true nightmares. The worst is the fact that you need to solve very hard puzzles and can’t even confirm where those puzzles really are.
I make it sound like it’s impossible, but the level design is actually really clever and you often know what to do. I only had real, real trouble with 4 or 5 of them.

The adventure takes between 10 and 20 hours depending on whether you take all the paths available to you or not. Doing all the snowmen is a minimum of 20-30 more hours I think, depending on whether you use hints or not.
So it’s a very long game, the price can seem exaggerated but it’s absolutely not.

I think I covered everything. A Monster’s Expedition is one of the very, very few games that play with and master the “out of the box” type of puzzles. It’s very refreshing to see that, thanks Draknek!

Highly, highly recommended.

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Developer: Draknek & Friends
Publisher: Draknek & Friends
Platforms: Steam – Windows/Linux/macOS, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch
Release Date: September 10, 2020