The platforming is fairly simple and most of your necessary powerups improve your combat capabilities in some way, meaning most of the gameplay emphasis lies in fighting your way from room to room. The few bonus rooms tend to contain consumable items or currency, and most of your optional upgrades come from an impish shopkeeper named Jinx. Though the game leans heavier on the “Vania” side of its chosen genre than it does on the “Metroid” one the game is actually reasonably light on sidepaths and hidden secrets. It’s a simple story, but a reasonably effective one, thanks to the way it gently deconstructs a number of tropes associated with kid heroes whisked in from other worlds and their monster companions.Īs a Metroidvania, this is a game about exploring an open, interconnected 2D world and gaining new abilities that allow the player to visit more of it. In order to find her way back home (and find Chomp’s real mother), Ellie will have to dispose of the five despotic Kid Kings and restore the Monster World to its rightful state. These other children see Ellie as a threat to their rule and want her gone, but she has a newfound protector in Chomp: a tiny monster who bonds with her mere moments after his hatching. Or at least, it used to be five other children have come to this world before her, and they’ve abused the monsters’ belief in things like “prophesied child heroes from another world” to become tyrannical kings. Her investigations lead her to discover a mysterious glowing bracelet, and she’s quickly whisked away to a world ruled by monsters. Monster Tale is a tale about monsters, but it’s also about Ellie, a young girl who is woken up one night by a strange sound coming from the local woods. 2011’s Monster Tale was their freshman effort: a quirky, whimsical Nintendo DS title that once again uses the DS’s dual screens to blend genres together, this time in Metroidvania/virtual pet flavor.

Peter Ong and Ryan Pijai, Henry Hatsworth’s director and programmer respectively, broke away from EA Tiburon and founded their own game development studio, DreamRift, in 2009. It should come as no surprise that the developers behind Henry Hatsworth and the Puzzling Adventure – a quirky, whimsical Nintendo DS title that takes the term “puzzle platformer” quite literally – were a bit too good to roost forever at Electronic Arts.

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