Solving a puzzle will usually open the way to a portal to the Otherworld, and it’s there that you’ll battle. But more often than not the puzzles are so easy as to be pointless busy work, or obtuse and frustrating, holding up progress while you fumble around wondering where to go. When it works, the puzzle solving makes you feel like you're Sherlock, hunting down clues, pulling bits of seemingly irrelevant information from your memory banks after now realising that they're crucial to your investigation. Talking to other students outside of the mist will unlock a profile that explains a little about their backstory, but these aren’t simply for lore or world-building purposes – there are actually puzzles that use some of the information contained within these profiles that you’ll need to read in order to solve. Any mist-addled students you meet in there could be harmless, muttering to themselves or reliving some kind of trauma, or they could turn on you and chase you through the fog. In order to take down a Pactbearer you need to destroy three crystals that house their darkest desires or most shocking secrets, and those crystals are located deep in mist-filled areas that you’ll need to quickly traverse before you lose your mind. – and each has their own sinister agenda or horrible backstory. Each Pactbearer is an exemplar of one of the seven deadly sins – greed, lust, gluttony, etc. Your job here is to rid the school of the mist, and to do that you and the friends you meet along the way will need to take down the Pactbearers. It’s a tale that gets surprisingly dark at times and one which becomes increasingly ruthless. There’s no trip to the beach or embarrassing faux pas with the girls at the hot springs. Mm-hmm.ĭespite the cliché beginnings, once the narrative settles into a groove it becomes Monark’s driving force – an often grim and mature tale with an impressively high body count and hardly any stereotypical anime hijinks. You’re quickly introduced to the unsettlingly chipper dean of the academy and a floating, stuffed toy bunny rabbit that speaks in rhyme and knows all about the Otherworld – a place inhabited by violent fiends, and where you’ll need to go if you’re to rid Shin Mikado of the blight that has taken over. It’s quite literally insane in the membrane. The school starts filling with a strange mist and any student or faculty unlucky enough to spend too much time in the fog is driven mad. The game is set at the Shin Mikado academy in Japan – a reasonably normal school that’s thrown into turmoil when it’s suddenly surrounded by a pearlescent barrier that won’t allow anything in or out of the area. But Monark differentiates itself from that crowd by leaning into horror, with a slick gothy vibe throughout - it's a bit like Persona 3 going through a rough patch, overdoing the eyeliner and listening to Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness on repeat. On the surface, Monark looks like any number of other Japanese role-playing games that star high schoolers like Persona, Trails of Cold Steel, or some Shin Megami Tensei titles.
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