↓↑journey

By Jack Penwell

I choose you, roguelite!

Montabi is a deck-building, tactical roguelite with turn-based battles.

In Montabi, you play as one of three Montabi trainers: a student, a fighter or a chef, and travel through three areas to take back your stolen Montabi.

But what is a Montabi? Well, they’re a selection of cute animals/machines/food items, which can evolve after being levelled up to become more powerful versions of themselves.

Around The World In 80 Moves

Each area provides a couple of choices about where to go, be it a shop, a battle, a café or an event. Shops can allow you to purchase Charms, which provide passive effects to the team, Equipment, which provide passive effects to a certain Montabi/your trainer and Supply, which can be used in a battle to offer special effects like healing and damage.

A café allows you to either heal your team or level one of them up, something I would suggest doing, as that’s how you gain access to the best cards. Also, unlike with most other options, there’s no negative to the café, so feel free to use whenever they come up.

Event Time!

The events are where things can change on a dime as each time you visit one, something happens, good or bad, and you get given further choices as to how you’d respond to the event.

It could be that you run into a famous Montabi trainer and get given a Charm that increases your punching attacks. Or you run into one of the X Gang, the evil team in the city who attack your Montabi, giving them injury cards.

Each option you can pick corresponds normally to the level of risk you’re willing to endure, with higher risk meaning a higher reward. But plan ahead – if, for example, you send your prized Montabi off to train for two areas, make sure that you’ve got enough in reserve to not lose before you get them back.

Time To Get Down And Dirty

Finally, you have the battles, the core of the experience. There are three different types, with normal battles, elite battles, whereby you have to contend with a powerful Montabi trainer and a boss battle at the end of each area.

The elite battles provide better rewards than normal battles, but they can be considerably more challenging, and you also can’t catch Elite Montabi, so I’d leave them until later in your run when you’ve already built your team.

Throwing Food At Animals

Talking of catching the Montabi, you might have noticed that I didn’t specify that this game is in the creature collecting genre. That would be because, while you technically can choose to catch Montabi, all it involves is chucking a biscuit at one of the Montabi you’ve battled, and they instantly get caught.

There’s no way to catch them before the match ends, or any sort of way to improve your odds to catch them, so it could have been replaced with finding more cards and you wouldn’t notice.

Turn-based Roguelites

As for the battles proper? Montabi hits the rougelite spot just right, although with a couple of caveats. Namely, the meta-progression is sorely needed at the beginning to offer enough options for you to win.

As with many other turn-based roguelites, you might find yourself facing off against an enemy which simply overpowers you, with no amount of skill allowing you to win against the heart of the cards.

Compared to, say, Hades or The King is Watching, your skill level can only get you so far, as an 80-damage attack is always going to hurt you. That’s not to say that there isn’t skill involved in the game; far from it, but keep in mind that the difficulty curve goes up and down depending on RNG.

However, once you’ve got a decent selection of Montabi available and an understanding of the unique effects the game uses, namely the four ‘taste traits’, then the game really opens up. I had plenty of times when I thought I was done for, only to scrape by through the skin of my teeth or be able to utilise a great combo to absolutely destroy the field.

Let’s Get Moving

This is due in part to the addition of having to think of tactical placements of not only your cards, but where on the field your Montabi are. As a general rule of thumb, you want at least one Montabi in the row ahead of your trainer as if your trainer dies, that’s game over, but other than that, there’s quite a lot of options.

Note: this is also the only way to do a ‘taunt’ in the game and make it so the enemy attacks your Montabi. Unless they decide to just target another square where your trainer is, in which case I hope you brought armour.

Some Montabi require a few squares in front of them to line up their attacks just right, while others benefit from being able to move around a lot. Others still have attacks which can hit multiple enemies based on where they are, or heal adjacent Montabi. Overall, the placement of your Montabi is as important as the cards, especially as you can see the ‘intent’ of the next turn’s attacks.

This means you can strategically place your characters out of harm’s way, provided, of course, that you’ve got the cards in which to do so. Unfortunately, your hand shuffles after each turn, so you can’t pre-prepare outside of not using cards so they don’t end up in the discard pile, but it can be a great time using a host of seemingly innocuous cards to try and find the card you need.

Bring In The Reserves!

Another layer is the fact that you can only have so many Montabi on the field at once – normally it’s two, but you can get a Charm which increases it to three. The other Montabi in your party act as your reserve, which you can swap into at any point, as long as you have the card. Thankfully, this card is automatically added to your trainer each turn.

Using this reserve pool is paramount to winning in the later stages of the game, as sometimes you’ll have no choice but to let a Montabi faint and tank the damage. But the Montabi’s revive counter still runs down in the reserve pool, so you can swap them out and carry on. You can also get Equipment and Charms that increase your Montabi’s AP (ability points) even when they’re in reserve, so suddenly you’ve got an extra three Montabi that can be used to deal more damage.

Not only that, but the reserve card can be discarded at any point when you need to discard a card to unlock another card’s effect, and so the combos begin. And combos you will need, as some of the bosses have some LARGE health bars.

Difficulty, Graphics And Music

Overall, Montabi isn’t too difficult in the regular mode, and there’s plenty of difficulty options for you to play around with depending on your own skill level and experience with the genre. It took me about ten playthroughs to finish the game using a mix of the normal difficulty and the Rookie difficulty.

Similar to a game like Hades, the game pushes you to beat it multiple times with different characters and setups to unlock the true ending. However, let’s just say that the narrative, while nice, isn’t what you should be playing the game for.

The graphics are lovely, and there’s plenty of cool character designs and character-specific card designs which add to the world – it all feels lived in. The music is also classic chiptune – great for the first few runs and then easy to swap out for a podcast or music if wanted.

Closing Thoughts

I started playing Montabi and thought it was a pretty standard roguelite affair, and to be honest, it is. But it’s also got that special something that makes you think ‘just one more round’ which makes a roguelite so exciting to play. It might not convert any new people to the genre, but if you’ve got a roguelite-sized hole in your life, I’d certainly take a look.

8/10

A Nintendo Switch 2 review code was provided by the publisher.