There are way too many roguelike deckbuilders that are just another roguelike deckbuilders, but this new game by Indonesian indie devs Mankibo is bringing some new ideas to the table.
Their new game, Montabi, has a bit of influence from Pokémon but also from Mega Man Battle Network, on top of the Slay The Spire-ish roguelike deckbuilder mechanics which involves literal deck of cards.
In Montabi, you’re a trainer who’s out to rescue your stolen Montabi (the cute little monsters you collect and tame in this world) which will lead you to a city-wide journey and some gang-busting action.
The Montabi can grow and evolve, but skills are represented as cards, with keywords and all. So skills are designed to be synergised with the right team, that’s the deckbuilding comes in.
The combat is represented in a 3×3 tactical grid, like a card game, or specifically like Mega Man Battle Network. So skills can have AOE effects, or hit every vertical or horizontal line. Positioning is just as important as building a cheese tactic of a card deck.
The trainer you embody also fights in a Montabi battle, with at least three different trainers to choose from at the start with different stats and playstyle. There are 22 starter Montabi, 570+ cards and 200+ items, so the permutations and combinations that you can do to create your unique deck should be, to use a non-mathematical term, quite a lot.
Between the bakso (meatball) making sim Kuloniku, coffee making-themed visual novel Coffee Talk Tokyo and Montabi, the Indonesian indie dev scene have cooked up some good game releases this year. Montabi doesn’t really have any culinary theming, so we mean this more in the metaphorical sense.
Montabi was in Early Access for some time, but it’s now available in its version 1.0 form. Montabi is out now on PC (Steam), Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch and Switch 2.