"We were worried about how our Monster Sanctuary community would react to the change in genre"- moi rai games' community-first approach to game development with Aethermancer

How does a studio follow up a first-try success story? Moi rai games is one of the rare cases of an indie studio debuting with a game— which was started as a free-time project, no less— published by a renowned indie publisher (Team17) and instantly striking gold. At the time of writing, Monster Sanctuary has nearly 5000 Steam reviews with a 97% Overwhelmingly Positive rating.

Seven years after the €100k Kickstarter campaign, and five years after Monster Sanctuary hit 1.0, moi rai games has returned with a different iteration of what has come to define the studio: monster taming. While Monster Sanctuary mixed it with a metroidvania, Aethermancer is mixing monster taming with roguelite. Here’s how the studio found the balance between innovation and staying true to their loyal fanbase.

If the moniker monster taming isn’t ringing a bell, what about Pokémon? Nintendo’s megalithic giant is the most famous example of the genre, and the main reason why most have never even heard about monster taming or creature collecting. While Minecraft kickstarted the survival sandbox genre and spawned an endless supply of games following in its footsteps, Pokémon has had such a stranglehold on the genre that its footsteps are the only ones around.

Or, at least, that was the case when Monster Sanctuary came out. Speaking to Button Musher on the matter, the moi rai team gave their perspective:

We definitely feel like [monster taming] has been an under-served genre for a long time. When we released Monster Sanctuary there were so [few] monster taming games, especially [indies], and [we] do think that the big footsteps of Pokémon and the expectations players might already bring to the table played a role in that.

Thankfully, a lot has changed since then. We’ve now seen Palworld, the glorious return of Digimon with Time Stranger, and many more join the fray. For moi rai, the previous vacuum was an opportunity for “offering the players something they have been missing”. For better and for worse, Pokémon has remained mostly the same for nearly three decades.

Mixing monster taming with genres like Metroidvania and creating games “that are challenging and for a more mature audience” allowed moi rai to stand out and to land a hit with Monster Sanctuary. Following it up meant taking some risks while building on the studio’s sturdy foundation.

”Having had a first project like Monster Sanctuary (…) certainly helped in many ways. (…) We managed to build and nurture a very engaged community [which] trusted us as a development team and were interested to see what we do next.”

Aethermancer, mixing monster taming with roguelite, surpassed the first game’s peak CCU (concurrent users) on Steam during its launch week. A couple months after release, it is about to reach 2000 Steam reviews while maintaining a 90% Very Positive rating. While moi rai agrees that being a Roguelite helped, they attribute most of this success to the community they built with Monster Sanctuary, to which they appealed when they transferred their core strengths (“like the deep skill system for each monster”) from that game to Aethermancer.

And that loyal community is what was at the forefront of moi rai games’ worries when they decided to mix monster taming with Roguelite instead of Metroidvania. When I asked if they were concerned about how ubiquitous the Roguelite genre had become, especially on Steam, they weren’t thinking about it at all, but were instead worried about “how our existing community from Monster Sanctuary would react to the change in genre”.

So far, it seems they’ve received it quite well, which shouldn’t be too surprising. What made moi rai games stand out with Monster Sanctuary was how deep they went with the skill system for each monster. While the Metroidvania genre worked well in giving players a glimpse into it, Aethermancer’s 3v3 Roguelite system excels at showcasing how dynamic and versatile it truly is.

Players are already concocting some devilish builds, and moi rai are all for it. “Making every monster useful and viable in some way was certainly a focus of ours.” The love and effort put into every single creation is evident, and they acknowledge that “broken builds are part of good roguelite games”. Their focus when balancing the monster isn’t to prevent these builds from existing, but instead to make them challenging to reach so the game doesn’t become too easy.

Given the success of Monster Sanctuary and the invaluable support moi rai games got from Germany’s Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Action through a public application, Aethermancer is being developed by a considerably bigger team and came out in Early Access in a much more polished state.

The plan is to have Aethermancer in this state for only around one year, so we might see 1.0 come out as early as Q4 2026, but as moi rai games proudly state in their website, they develop games in a “it’s done when it’s done” way. Aethermancer is available now on Steam and is Deck Verified. It is 10% off until December 4th, so if you have any monster taming itch you’d like to scratch, what are you waiting for? The fantastical world of Terastae awaits.