Monster Sanctuary
BANGER · RPG · 2020
Steam Deck VerifiedThe verdict
BUY IT.
A BANGER at $19.99.
- Length
- 30.3h
- Value
- $0.66/hr
- Reviews
- 91% positive
Watch this gameOne alert when it is worth buying.
Minimum on the Steam store: 2 GB of memory, GeForce 8800 GT 512 MB, Radeon HD 4870 512 MB, 1 GB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS, Linux.
Monster taming meets metroidvania. Collect, train and battle monsters in a lovely side-scroller pixel world.
What drives the score
How to read this
Grades run S to D, read from the buyer's side. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. How the grades work
The value story
It has never been cheaper than $4.99. That was November 2023. 63 discounts in the 7 years on record. They run about 66 percent off, roughly 6 weeks apart.
Value puts it in the top 1 percent of the games it competes with. It is pricier than 88 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 95 percent. Among the games that feel like it, Hyper Light Drifter ($4.99, scores 89) beats it on value, while it beats Monster Crown ($9.99, scores 2).
The press gave it 81; the people who bought it give it 91 percent. A 10-point gap in the buyer's favour.
Of the 800 Steam-purchase reviews this site sampled, 10 come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written July 2022 to September 2026. That is fewer refunded reviewers than 7 in 10 paid games this site has sampled to the same depth, and among the 3,162 games in its genre sampled this deeply, 2,321 have a larger share. Inside the two-hour refund window, 75 percent of the 438 reviews written there were positive, against 91 percent overall, and those are 4 percent of everything written about it.
Deck Verified, so no launch options and no controller remapping before it runs.
The drop-off
89% start to 6% rarestNo achievement in this game marks the ending, so there is no finish rate. The curve runs from the most-unlocked achievement to the rarest, and its shape is where players stop. Steam global achievements
Players
69 players online when we last checked, on Sep 30, 11:46 UTC.
Player counts from the Steam Web API.
What players say
The early game is pretty terrible. It's not great to look at, the music is pretty mid, the monsters aren't very interesting and the level design is very bland. The dialogue is especially egregious, where every living NPC is standing there to explain exactly one concept of story or gameplay and have nothing else going for them at this point. The one thing that kept me going was seeing my starter monster's skill tree...
Really well put together monster tamer game the metroidvania style map was a little weird to me at first but I actually grew to enjoy it after playing for a while. There are a few QoL problems that could use improvement but overall it was a really enjoyable experience, hopefully they make a sequel in the future.
A metroidvania for Pokemon lovers who want a deep battle system. If you want anything else out of your metroidvania I'd look elsewhere. The game expects you to read through dozens of mons and their abilities to form a tightly compatible team otherwise you WILL get hard stuck on a boss battle in this game. Don't get too attached to your mons because this game wants you to optimize your team which probably means...
Steam reviews, mixed to match its Steam ratio and rotated daily. Opinions are theirs.
Cite this score
Monster Sanctuary scores 85/100 on the BANG Score (a BANGER) as of Oct 2, 2026. The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/814370/monster-sanctuaryReviews set the ceiling, and price against real length moves the BANG Score inside it. How it works, and where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 17, price as of Oct 1.
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