After Game Pass made me fall in love with this Slay the Spire-like on Xbox, one of the best roguelike deckbuilders out there is finally coming to PlayStation 5

You know, when I first booted up Monster Train back in 2020, I rolled my eyes. “Oh, a Slay the Spire clone, is it?” I chided. But within about 10 minutes, Monster Train had completely derailed all those pithy little putdowns that were gestating in the back of my head. In under half an hour, it had punched my ticket, good and proper. This is no mere clone of Mega Crit’s 2019 deck-building opus, no. It’s a fully-fledged competitor; a competent rethinking of the genre, a serious rival that legitimised roguelike deck-builders as a genre. And I fell in love with it.

The game remixes Slay the Spire’s genius ideas with its own, unique flair. Instead of pushing forward to the heart of all evil in Slay the Spire, Monster Train flips the script somewhat – and has you defending against waves of angelic foes that are dead set on extingusihing the fire you’re chaperoning to the heart of the underworld in order to rekindle the flames of hell (yes, really).

It’s got more of a tower defense vibe to it, then; setting you and your team of demons against other teams of behorned baddies. It’s a less lonely affair than Slay the Spire, where your lone warrior/thief/robot pushes into the hostile world.

But the differences don’t end there. Because trains are small, you only have a certain amount of ‘capacity’ per room you’re in, meaning that you can only summon a set amount of demons per carriage. And you have to think ahead; how do you scale up your summoned hordes in order to defend against angles that can one-hit kill, for instance? How do you make sure your defense and attack are increasing incrementally, so you can go toe-to-toe with the armies of God?

I’ve been playing a lot of Balatro recently (help me, please God, help me), and Monster Train has a similar central conceit, once you boil away all the flavour and garnishing. It’s a numbers game at its core, and your job is to manage your deck so you can rely on pulling the right cards at the right time. Your enemy is luck, as much as it is anything else. Often, you’ll find that your own greed or complacency is actually what undercuts you – I cannot count on my fingers the number of times that I’ve been hoisted by my own petard in these games. They’re smarter than you, and they like to remind you of that fact.

But therein lies Monster Train’s charm. It’s the sort of game that makes a full and proper mechanic out of ‘just one more go’. Unlocking new decks, and new cards, and learning how to synergise in the most effective way is all part of the game – and I actually find Monster Train more generous than Slay the Spire in this regard. You can go from ‘base deck’ techniques to advanced-level mathematical shithousery in just a few runs. It’s catnip. Impossible to put down after less than a few hours’ playtime.

And I’m not the only person that loves it. A cursory look around the internet will show you that people all over the world are smitten with Monster Train’s unique blend of luck-based strategy and skill-based tactics. It’s rated 4.6 over on GoG. It sits on 10/10 with nearly 18,000 reviews on Steam. It’s got a 4.9 rating on the App Store. People, rightly, love this game.

And now it’s coming to PlayStation, we can probably predict another storefront with rave reviews for the Good Shepard-published game, too. It’s about time. The game has been available on PC, Switch, and Xbox (where it was launched as part of Xbox Game Pass, and found a loyal and fervent audience early on) for a while, and has attracted well over 1.5 million players since 2020. Now it’s on PlayStation - for a very reasonable $24.99 - I finally have an excuse to circle around and say: play the damn game. There’ll be hell to pay if you don’t.

Monster Train launches on PS5 today. It's also available on mobile, PC, Switch, and Xbox.