Abomi Nation is a roguelike mons RPG — essentially, an entire game built around a randomizer Nuzlocke. I think this is a pretty smart pairing — the biggest problem in mons games is that it’s infeasible for a single player to use more than a small fraction of the total roster, so by building the game around multiple playthroughs and randomizing your team each run, you get to appreciate a wider variety of mons than you would otherwise.

The Nuzlocke comparison is very apt, however, because the gameplay is otherwise nearly identical to Pokemon’s, with all of its flaws along for the ride.

If you’ve been following any of my monster collector reviews you know the drill by now: 90% of battles are decided before they begin; mons rarely survive more than two or three hits so strategy comes down almost entirely to if you have the right type matchup; battles are one-on-one so team play and synergy are virtually nil. I frequently found myself wishing for an autobattle button, which as I’ve said repeatedly in prior reviews is quite possibly the most damning thing one can say about a game. If your players want to skip your core gameplay loop, you have epically failed as a designer.

It also carries over Pokemon’s mechanic of free unlimited healing in towns, which is silly. What is even the point of damage persisting across battles when the only cost to remove it is time? (An upcoming update at least plans to make after-battle healing automatic, which is something I guess.) It’s especially bizarre in a roguelike, which are supposed to be tense affairs of uncertainty and limited resources. When you can heal at any time, there’s no challenge. You can even grind indefinitely, and the game even realizes this is a bad idea because it also adds a level cap until you beat the next boss. What is even the point of tying levels to number of battles fought at that point? Why not tie level to something more explicitly related to progress, like number of screens explored?

There is one new mechanic, though it’s also one I dislike: Some (but not all) of your team reserves remain on the field behind the active mon, and they can be targeted by AoE attacks and still tick DoT. They still can’t do anything though, they just sit there and watch their friend get wailed on. I presume the purpose of this mechanic is to make it harder to save mons from permadeath by swapping them out when they hit low HP… except this mechanic only applies to half your team at once so you can still do that. Why aren’t all 6 of your mons subject to this? In practice I just found it incredibly frustrating and nonsensical. Why on Earth do they just stand there like idiots? They tick DoT, so it’s not like we can assume they’re in stasis like pokemon are. I was expecting something like in Soul Hackers where they can still participate but with a more limited moveset, and was pretty surprised to find that no, they just stand there.

Something I did like, though: It resolved the “Shouldn’t all floating pokemon be immune to Ground?” problem by making flying vs. grounded a separate flag from abilities, so flying mons can now resist ground-based moves without having to give up an ability slot for it. There are even a few special attacks that also deal more damage to fliers, so it’s an interesting tradeoff. Take notes, Pokemon.

The type list has been pared down to a more reasonable 8, which I don’t mind, and all of them are concrete physical things, so you don’t have to waste time wondering what in the world is supposed to be good against “Fairy” or “Ghost”. (Although I did find a few of the Earth and Lightning interactions a little unintuitive.) And dual-types do exist — thank you for reminding me I can’t take even that for granted, Monster Crown.

All of this unfortunately means I have no desire to continue playing past a single run. The game has all the usual problems of roguelikes: The environments and challenges are all extremely flat, samey, and obviously computer-generated. The thought of starting a new run doesn’t fill me with excitement over the new possibilities of using a different team, because with the tactical element as deep as a puddle they’re all pretty much the same. It might have worked if the game had Monster Sanctuary‘s battle system and its custom build mechanic for mons, but alas.

The monster designs, at least, are good. They take a very clear inspiration from Pokemon’s formula: Most of them are a fusion of an animal with either another animal, an object, or an abstract concept, with extremely on-the-nose pun or portmanteau names. I like that formula, though, so I’m not complaining. The art style manages to be enjoyable while also feeling distinct from Pokemon’s, and virtually all the abomis are delightfully cute. And I was particularly pleased to see a solidly consistent focus on animal mons rather than the humanoid-and-object craze that has been infesting Pokemon for the past few generations. I play mons games to play with monsters, not tiny humans, thank you.

There is also a surprisingly detailed plot. As you might expect, it reads like every Nuzlocke fic ever, though at least there is an actual cause worth risking peoples’ lives for: Every century the god of light and the god of darkness fight over who gets control of the island, and you play as the god of light trying to save the world from evil. The villain actually brings up a lot of the standard criticisms of Nuzlocke fic, namely that you could end all the death by just stopping, but the rebuttals to it are actually sensible since the villain is actually evil and your mons can talk and thus confirm that they are willing to risk their lives for this. (Although I would have liked if it was more critical of the part where Ioti gets the opportunity to kill the villain at the halfway point but refuses because uwu murder is wrong. Trigun remains ever-relevant.)

We even get this swipe at Pokemon’s ethics, which was extremely validating. Thank you, game.

Unfortunately, the roguelike format kneecaps this really, really badly. We are clearly supposed to get attached to our teammates and feel guilty when they die, but of course they’re all just cookie-cutter personalities with canned dialogue, thus tripping into the standard roguelike problem of showing the wires too easily. The characters are all obviously just shallow, artificial constructs, so their lives and deaths hold no emotional impact.

You would think someone trying to write a story-focused roguelike would be aware of this problem and at the very least write a ton of variants for the canned dialogue to make it less likely people see a repeat (like the best roguelike, Hades, did). They did not. There aren’t even six different personality types, so you are guaranteed to get repeats if you fill out a full team. The repeated dialogue also kneecaps the ethics, because when you give every new recruit the exact same speech about how you’re so special and this is so important no matter how many people have died before them, you look like a soulless, manipulative monster. Perhaps worst of all, the game tried to add pathos to the deaths by having teammates mourn them in various cutscenes, but this can result in people mourning teammates they never met, which is such an obvious goof I’m surprised the dev hasn’t patched it. The canned dialogue for this is also extremely limited, and it rather deflates the pathos to see mons giving the exact same eulogy for five different people.

Obviously, procedurally generating emotionally affecting characters is infeasible if not outright impossible with current levels of technology, but like… you could have some self-awareness that this medium is a bad fit for the story you want to tell. It would have made much, much more narrative sense to play as the dark spirit callously using and discarding mons. The story even provides a ready-made justification for the shallow personalities, which is that his mons are all reanimated undead. You could use that to poke fun at the canned dialogue, even! Such a wasted opportunity.

So in the end… I honestly don’t know whether or not to recommend this? It definitely has good qualities that some people might consider to outweigh the bad, but those people are not me. I see this as more interesting from a game and story design angle through the lens of monster collectors, rather than good as an actual, you know, game.