Ever since Pokémon came onto the scene in the mid-90s, monster-collecting RPGs have been a mainstay subgenre. A surge of similar games hit the market in that era, most adopting a similar turn-based RPG format. While most major publishers have abandoned experimenting with the subgenre outside of a handful of popular series, indie developers have stepped in to put their own spin on the concept, often focusing on elements fans clamor for but larger developers haven’t delivered. Temtem made the dream of an MMO monster-collecting RPG a reality, and Ooblets fused collecting monsters with farming and life-sim elements. Adore seeks to do something similar by applying the core concept of monster capturing/raising to the popular action-based, roguelike structure. While Adore does offer some novel ideas and interesting mechanics, the resulting fusion of two distinct gameplay styles ends up a bit of a dud.
Adore‘s story begins with Lukha, a young boy who wakes up after a fateful encounter with the dark beast Ixer, who has cursed the world of Gaterdrik. Draknar, the god of creatures, has had his power drained by Ixer but used the last of his strength to hide himself inside Lukha’s body to give him new life. Draknar explains that Lukha is now an Adorer, a human who can bond with the creatures of the land, and compels him to use these new abilities to fight back against Ixer and his curse upon the world. All in all, it’s a standard setup of good vs. evil, and the game doesn’t do much to evolve the narrative into something more unique or engaging than this basic premise. There is a hub village with a handful of NPCs to interact with, but beyond some flavor text after quest completion and a few tutorials, they don’t have much to say. Unfortunately, this lack of dialogue and worldbuilding causes Gaterdrik to feel bland, so I wasn’t invested in the core conflict.
The game’s mechanics are where Adore innovates the most, though not necessarily for the better. The player controls Lukha from a top-down perspective (similar to Diablo) and all combat takes place in real time. However, Lukha cannot attack directly and must instead summon creatures to fight for him. He can only summon as many creatures as his stamina bar allows, and each creature has a basic attack and a special attack when its special bar is fully charged. Creatures appear in the direction Lukha is facing and target the nearest enemy before running back to Lukha. Each creature has its own health bar, but once that bar is depleted, any damage taken affects Lukha instead. Enemies can directly target Lukha, and his main defensive abilities are running away or a dodge roll with invincibility frames.
In practice, this means most combat encounters involve running away from creatures while rapidly summoning your own to take aggro away from Lukha and damage the enemy. The most effective strategy is to find creatures whose abilities pair well together; for example, a quick but weak creature who freezes the enemy and a slow creature who has a powerful attack. Discovering these combinations can be satisfying, but the controls don’t support the combat. There is no ability to aim your summons, so you can only summon creatures directly in front of you as you move. Since you constantly retreat, this causes your creatures to manifest in the wrong direction and thus whiff their attacks. It’s possible the game controls better with a mouse and keyboard, but the battles were an endless source of frustration on Switch, running in circles and struggling to orient Lukha properly while summoning creatures in the right spot.
Similarly, the gameplay structure is somewhat disappointing. Missions are procedurally generated and located in a handful of different biomes, each containing a unique roster of monsters to fight and capture. Each area is a collection of procedurally generated rooms connected by a green mist. In order to move from one room to the next, you must defeat all monsters in that room. This constant cycle of entering a room, defeating all the monsters, then moving onto the next becomes repetitive almost immediately, and the game rarely deviates from this structure.
This structure fails mainly because rooms are virtually indistinguishable from each other. One may have a slightly different layout of obstacles or ruins or a slight variation in aesthetic, but they begin to bleed together and enemy creatures are placed haphazardly. I’m a big fan of procedurally generated roguelikes; the best games in this genre have intricate level and encounter design and carefully fine-tuned procedural generation systems so that each area feels interesting or unique in some way. That careful construction is virtually absent from the levels in Adore, causing the game to devolve into a monotonous slog only a few hours in.
Missions are simple, with one main task and a few optional objectives. The most common mission types are to eliminate all cursed monsters in the area or to defeat powerful legendary creatures, though sometimes you may have to activate a structure to clear away the curse. Regardless of the objective, these missions devolve into the same loop of clearing out a room, fighting waves of spawning enemies while standing in one spot, or taking an object from one side of the room to the other while defeating enemies. There are also Expeditions, where the player can embark on a series of procedurally generated missions in sequence without a chance to return to the village to restock or change out your monsters. These mostly serve as a test of endurance but do little to inject more variety into the game since they are just the same handful of familiar mission types.
One bright spot amongst the sea of mediocrity is boss fights. Occasionally, you are tasked with defeating a particularly strong enemy: another Adorer or a fight with Ixer himself. These fights take place in static, purpose-built arenas or hand-crafted set pieces and are by far the most interesting part of the game. Battles against other Adorers are the most exciting, as they play by the same basic rules you do. You can attack them directly or focus on harming their creatures to do indirect damage to them, which keeps battles strategic and engaging.
Progression mechanics are another bright spot, though they too are hampered by some ill-considered limitations. Capturing monsters grants you an elemental orb that can be infused into another monster, creating a synergy. Monsters are all one of four types: Beast, Nature, Arcane, and Mystic. Beast creatures tend to favor physical melee attacks, Arcane creatures focus on ranged magic attacks, and Nature and Mystic creatures focus on utility skills such as healing or status effects. By infusing a creature of one element with the orb of another, you can strengthen or modify their attacks when a creature of that corresponding element is in the party of four. This system encourages experimentation with how you build out your party of creatures and is key to overcoming some of Adore’s tougher challenges. However, you are severely limited in the number of creatures in your roster, inhibiting your ability to experiment and acquire more elemental orbs through capturing. You must purchase more slots in your monster stable one at a time through upgrade shards, which only spawn rarely in missions. This is needlessly restrictive and only serves to artificially pad out the length of a game with very little variety.
I came away from Adore extremely disappointed. While I still believe that combining monster-collecting mechanics in an action roguelike framework could be effective, this title has too many missteps that prevent it from being enjoyable after a couple hours. Furthermore, the control and presentation issues on Nintendo Switch exacerbate these core design flaws, making for an overall frustrating gameplay experience.
