Monolith

Review

Your name is Tessa Carter, and you have woken up on a hospital bed! A doctor sitting down next to your bed asks if you remember what happened. All the doctor reveals is that you have been in a coma for a while. The images in your mind are vague, but you recall being cold and stuck in some sort of pod! As your memory slowly clunks into gear, you begin conveying to the doctor all that you remember. 

Monolith is a 2D click-and-point adventure game developed and self-published by Animation Arts on the 11^th of October, 2023, on the Steam platform.

The game starts with a great cutscene, where you see your spaceship hit an asteroid and make its way down to an unknown planet! From that point, Tessa, your character, will wake up in a hospital bed where a doctor will start questioning you. Having finished the game and reflected on the way the story was told, I think the developers have done a brilliant job, not only of how the story evolves but the way they keep you guessing about what really happened to your character until you are close to the end.

Essentially, the game is presented as a daily story, with each day being one chapter. Each time you finish a chapter/day, a new cutscene of Tessa on her hospital bed will slowly reveal more of what happened to her. One of the chapters will be the crash site, another will have Tessa walking into a strange forest, two other chapters find her at a deserted facility and then there’s one where Tessa enters a library.

As a click-and-point adventure game, you must figure out puzzles within each chapter to move on to the next. The puzzles are well-composed and make sense, and you’ll also encounter several mini-games, of which a few are quite challenging. You have the option of skipping these mini-games if you find them too hard. As for the puzzles, your sidekick, CORE, a drone that you will acquire early on in the game, will be able to help you by scanning each room you visit and providing valuable information. In the later stage of the game, CORE will be able to replay holographic conversations in each room, where you will find further information to help you move on to the next part of the story. If you are not sure that you have found all the interactive objects within a room, you can use the magnifying glass icon at the bottom of the screen, and it will show you all the points in the current room that you can interact with. I like how easy it is to access your inventory and combine objects. All you have to do is move your cursor to the far-right side of your screen, and the inventory will appear. Combining objects is really simple; you just have to select an object and click on another one.  If it works, you’ll have a new object; if not, you’ll hear a negative sound effect. 

Out of all the chapters, the forest was probably the most difficult for me. Not because it is presented as a type of labyrinth where you keep coming back to the same places, but because it was hard to know what to do. There are not many objects to find and use, but figuring out where to place them had me baffled. I was stuck for a while, trying to understand the objects I had found and what to do with them in that chapter.

The game took me a good 12 hours from start to finish, which reflects the length of time it took me to complete the puzzles and some of the mini-games.

I am very impressed with this game as the story is well-structured, the puzzles are not too hard but not too easy either, and the mini-games are fun. The graphics are great.  The game ran well apart from a few issues; one was Tessa unexpectedly walking off the screen, and the others were minor graphic issues.  The rest was fine. The game is available in two languages, English and German.

Review written by THE CPT FROGGY for Zeepond.com

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