It was just over a year ago that we first caught wind of an upcoming game called Monolisk (Free) from developer Trickster Arts, which looked to fuse the action-focused adventuring of something like Bastion with the community-driven level creation aspects of something like Mario Maker. And heck, “Bastion meets Mario Maker" sure is a hell of a prospect on paper. We followed along with the game’s development over the next several months until Monolisk was finally released in mid-October. Unfortunately, that golden idea on paper didn’t quite translate as well to the actual product. It’s not that Monolisk was a bad game by any stretch, but with how its progression system was tied to unlocking new items and gear, and how those items and gear were pretty much necessary in order to create levels that were interesting to play through, the early hours of Monolisk ended up feeling very sterile, and it didn’t seem likely that many would bother sticking around long enough for things to start getting more interesting. This was the basic conclusion we came to about the game in our own review from October.

Thankfully the foundation of Monolisk was solid and there was nothing stopping the experience from being greatly improved through tweaking some of the design and adding in more content. And that’s just what Trickster Arts has been doing for the past 8 months or so with frequent updates for Monolisk, and it all culminated this week with what they are calling simply “The Massive Update" which is now available. It contains a whopping 60 new cards that feature 5 new environments, 10 new creatures, and 5 new character sets that each have their own unique items and abilities. On top of that there are a whole bunch of new interactive elements like “teleports, locked doors, healing wells, poisons, potions" and more, as well as new objects and decorations for all the existing realms. You can see all of this newness on display in the following trailer.

As mentioned, this latest massive update adds on to all the existing work the developers have put into Monolisk since its release, which includes things like the ability to create playable Campaigns out of your created dungeons (which even predates a similar feature added to Super Mario Maker 2 earlier this year), improvements to how created levels are featured and searched to help the best created content rise to the top, and a whole lot more. Monolisk as it is today is definitely a more enjoyable experience than it was at launch, which is something worth applauding. Also, because it’s a free game it’s very possible you downloaded it when it launched and were underwhelmed and have since deleted it from your device. I’d say that now is a great time to give it another chance and see if these 8 months of efforts have changed your mind, or if you missed out on Monolisk the first time around now is also a good time to jump in and see what it’s all about.