A Monster’s Expedition
An open-world puzzler with a journey to savour
PC
Five years ago, Alan Hazelden and a few of his friends taught us that A Good Snowman Is Hard To Build. A good videogame? Well, that’s tougher still. “The process begins with getting a team together to make something with some kind of plan that it’ll take two to 12 months,” Hazelden tells us. “Then it’s obviously always longer than that.” He clearly didn’t expect it to take three years and counting, but A Monster’s Expedition (Through Human Exhibitions), to give it its full title, already looks like it’s been worth the effort. An ‘hour-long’ build turns out to be twice that, and that’s only partly down to our sluggish brains; naturally a game’s designer can get through their puzzles quicker than any player, but the relaxed ambience of the game’s verdant archipelago positively invites you to take your time.
Your goal is simply to explore a succession of small islands; how you cross the water between them is the game’s central mechanic. Snowman’s inquisitive monster is back (“In our heads,” Hazelden explains, “it’s just this really pleasant character who is naturally very curious and so that fit really nicely”), but this time he’s rolling logs rather than snowballs, and he’s rather less gentle with them, too. A push is enough to uproot a tree into its more manoeuvrable form; then you can tip a log up by nudging it from either end. Move around the side of it, however, and each shove will send the log rolling in that direction until it hits a solid object.
Sometimes, of course, you’ll want to push it off the edge, since that’s how you’ll get to the next island. A single log makes a perfect bridge; before long, you’re rolling two into place to form a makeshift raft, though that needs to be in the right position from which to push off to more distant shores. Then you’ll encounter larger logs that can’t be rolled back onto their ends. The learning curve is elegant, and any mistakes are quickly rectified: as well as an undo function that lets you wind back a single move, you can reset the entire island to its original position. There’s no punishment for doing so, and in some cases it’s necessary, because there’s often more than one route off the current island. The mere sight of another peeking out of the mist in a different direction than the obvious way forward is incentive enough for us to investigate.
Your natural curiosity is constantly rewarded, then, and not just by more puzzles. The whole game is themed as a whimsical museum tour of exhibits designed to teach outsiders about humanity. It’s such a natural fit – the writing is charming and witty, with a gently absurdist streak – that it’s a surprise to learn the idea didn’t come together until fairly recently. The islands, however, were in place from the very start. “I’ve always been interested in getting rid of menus and making something feel like a real space,” Hazelden says. “We did that with A Good Snowman Is Hard To Build and I was really happy with how it worked out; it made it feel more like a place that you’re just wandering around.”
It makes for an unusually accessible brand of puzzle game from a man who likes to challenge his players – Hazelden jokes that this is an apology of sorts for 2017’s delightful but demanding colony-building conundrum Cosmic Express. “My goal is that pretty much anyone should be able to pick it up and get to the end. And if you want harder puzzles, there’ll be a bunch of optional stuff.” His guiding principle is that a good puzzle should feel like a conversation between the designer and the player. That being the case, this is the equivalent of an enlightening chat with an old friend who tells the kind of stories that have you hanging on every word. We can’t wait to hear more.
The sight of another island peeking out of the mist is incentive enough to investigate