It was just over a year ago that we first caught wind of an upcoming game called Monolisk (Free) from developer Trickster Arts, which looked to fuse the action-focused adventuring of something like Bastion with the community-driven level creation aspects of something like Mario Maker. And heck, “Bastion meets Mario Maker" sure is a hell of a prospect on paper. We followed along with the game’s development over the next several months until Monolisk was finally released in mid-October. Unfortunately, that golden idea on paper didn’t quite translate as well to the actual product. It’s not that Monolisk was a bad game by any stretch, but with how its progression system was tied to unlocking new items and gear, and how those items and gear were pretty much necessary in order to create levels that were interesting to play through, the early hours of Monolisk ended up feeling very sterile, and it didn’t seem likely that many would bother sticking around long enough for things to start getting more interesting. This was the basic conclusion we came to about the game in our own review from October.
Thankfully the foundation of Monolisk was solid and there was nothing stopping the experience from being greatly improved through tweaking some of the design and adding in more content. And that’s just what Trickster Arts has been doing for the past 8 months or so with frequent updates for Monolisk, and it all culminated this week with what...