Monsters & Medicine
Platform: Mac, Windows, Linux
What do you do when hordes of monsters come a-knocking at your door? If you're a hospital you bring them inside, give them medical treatment and pray you have enough facilities to heal them all! Developers Leon and Francois van Niekerk and Hilgard Bell over at Clockwork Acorn bring us Monsters & Medicine, a turn-based strategy title that reminds us that even monsters need a little care and attention sometimes. Each turn different types of colorful monsters will appear at your door needing urgent treatment. You'll be dragging rooms and hallways onto your building to increase your ability to accommodate them all. Each monster type will need their own type of ward, and they'll also need to be able to get to it. Fortunately for all concerned, monsters will wait patiently outside in an orderly line, no pushing or shoving — in addition to drastically reducing your insurance premiums, your Orderly Conduct Policy has been the secret of your hospitals' success and made your treatment facilities an industry leader and the place for recuperation and healing.
If there isn't room in your building for the next monster, the rest wait behind it even if there are rooms for them available. Each turn monsters waiting outside will slowly lose health, while those receiving treatment will gradually recover and make room for others. ("Yes, Glorf the Terrible Smasher. You'll eventually be able to play the piano again.") In addition to medical bays and hallways you'll also have tiles that will boost the stats of the rooms around them, either by adding more beds to them or enhancing their cure rate. Some will affect all the rooms in the same row or column, while others will affect the rooms directly adjacent in either a diagonal or cross formation. You can also spend a move to reshuffle the assortment of tiles available for you to use, or give a rainbow elixer to a single monster outside to fully cure them. This can be strategically useful when you want to remove one from the line so you can get the rest in and cure them.
Upon admittance, monsters will pass by gigantic red and green thermometers in the Lobby depicting your monster healing requirements for passing the level (in green) and how many monster deaths are considered acceptable losses (in red), along with how many monsters you've already healed or allowed to pass away. Every hospital should be required to do this, don't you think? While this type of strategy game would be more typical of the spate of in-browser titles we can all get for free, here it's been honed with increasing complexity not usually found on in-browser variants and provides plenty of content. The demo features 16 levels along with a full tutorial and bios for each of the monster types, and if you like the game the full version comes with a hundred levels. Tiles randomize each time you replay a level keeping the experience refreshingly varied, and versions for Android and iOS are currently in the works so you'll soon be able to rehabilitate monsters no matter where you are.
Windows:
Play the web demo
Get the full version
Mac OS X:
Play the web demo
Get the full version
Linux:
Play the web demo
Get the full version
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