Monster Care Simulator
Monster Care Simulator is a sim game in which you own a Care Centre for Monsters. Customers will bring in hurt creatures, and your job is to clean, treat, and heal them.
Once they are fully healed, the customers will collect their Monster and pay you their fee.
Initial Gameplay
When starting out the game, the centre starts small with only a Wash Station.
You greet the customer, put the monster in the Wash Station, scrub it with soap and sponge, then place it in the garden to heal.
In the garden, pet the Monsters to make them happier. Customers will leave tips if the pets are at their happiest.
You can also purchase toys like a Soccer Ball or a Swing, which the monsters will play with to increase their happiness.
Care Machines and Progressions
As you gain reputation, you will unlock new upgrades and machines.
These include ice care station to treat frozen monsters, wound station to treat injured creatures, and burn statin to treat monsters that literally come in ON FIRE!
The other upgrades include earning more money and taking less time to use these stations, centre and garden expansions, as well as new decorations, toys, and fruits.
Employee Hire
As you grow your Care Centre, you can hire employees. These are of two types:
Asssistants will start out by cleaning the floor and picking up monster poop. With upgrades, each assistant can start washing monsters and treating them for ice, injuries, and burns.
Receptionist will take care of the front-facing responsibilities. They will analyse the monsters during intake, place them in the required care machine, and pick them up to hand them to customers to collect the fee.
By hiring both, essentially, you can focus on stocking, decorating, and hatching your own monsters.
Hatcher and Adoption
Yes, you can hatch your own monsters!
Occasionally, monsters will drop breeding items. These can either be an egg itself, or items such as horn or leaf.
Once you buy the Hatcher, one has to place an egg and 2 breeding objects to start the hatching process. After 2 to 3 days, the egg will be ready to be hatched.
You can take care of your own monsters on the first floor, which is practically your apartment. These monsters will level up with happiness, so buying toys and interacting with them is essential.
As you can have a limited number of monsters, the best use is to sell them at the Adoption Centre.
Their sell price scales based on their level, so the more you can level them before selling, the more profitable each adoption becomes.
Personal Review
Monster Care Simulator has been a pleasant surprise. As I'm accustomed to classic creature collecting games, this simulator aspect forced me to take a more cozy and chill approach, which was more enjoyable than I expected.
I'm already happy with the state of the game even though it's in Early Access. Having seen the roadmap, I'm most excited for June's update which will include shinies.
This will allow me to shiny-hunt, in some aspects, which gives more replayability and meaningfulness towards the late game once the core aspects of the centre are automated and handled by the employees.