Over the past several weeks, moi rai games (@moi_rai_) have been making cryptic tweets seemingly unrelated to Monster Sanctuary. Tweets about caves, dinosaurs, taking inspiration from other media with old forests and megafauna – clearly something has been going on in the mysterious underground.
Today, the announcement has broken up from under the surface and revealed itself. Monster Sanctuary (which we gave a 10, by the way) will be getting a free DLC called “Forgotten World“. The announcement says the DLC will “feature a new area with a variety of ancient Monsters that were long thought to be extinct.” The potential for huge, lumbering dinosaur monsters is high.
Interestingly though, the hints indicate that we won’t only be seeing completely new monsters – we may be seeing evolutions and new forms of monsters we already know. This tweet depicts what appears to be an evolution of the Fungi monster, now with legs and a staff.
Rilvenar, an intern at moi rai, tweets that the expected ETA for Forgotten World is Q2 2022, which isn’t that far away. Monster Sanctuary released a little under a year ago, and recently received a 1.2 “Legendary Keeper” patch which added 14 new challenging Keeper Battles to be puzzled through after completing the main game. Each of the Keepers you’ll fight during these battles is one of the high-tier backers from Monster Sanctuary’s original Kickstarter, who have each handpicked their own team of six monsters for you to try and takedown.
The 1.2 patch also added new cosmetic options for your player character, unlocked by finding special chests and completing sidequests around the Sanctuary. I’m particularly partial to the snow suit you get after returning to the Clothesmaker. On top of those cosmetic options and the new Keeper battles, 1.2 also brought a bunch of Quality of Life features, which are a stunning improvement on an already very polished game – you can now sort benched monsters by level, Monster Journal #, species, shift-type, and given name. Shield skills now display in the combat preview on health bars the way healing and damaging skills do, which removes the guesswork from one of the most important tactical parts of the game.
The “Casual” difficulty was also adjusted to make Keeper battles more approachable. I have to admit, I was stuck on some end-game Keeper battles for several months, and the “Casual” update brought me back to finish them. Even then, I struggled, and ended up remaking my team several times before finally beating the game – on Normal difficulty.
While initial post-release updates to Monster Sanctuary suffered some delays, the game’s remarkable quality continues to shine on. The recent 1.2 update demonstrated moi rai‘s dedication to their product, and the announcement of this Forgotten World DLC has confirmed at least several more months of content and support. If you haven’t given Monster Sanctuary a try yet, I still highly recommend it – it is a refined and polished gem in the growing genre of PC-playable monster collecting games.
