Open now · By request
MonsterCare playtest
by Housefolk
MonsterCare is a narrative management game about the imaginary friends we outgrow. As keeper of an inn between worlds, cook, garden, and decorate to help them remember who they were and go home to be imagined anew.
It's free to ask. The developer chooses who gets in.
- Access
- By request
- On playtest since
- Aug 11, 2023
- Planned release
- Coming soon
- Developer
- Housefolk
- Platforms
- Windows, Linux
- Players
- Single-player
- Languages
- English, French, German, Italian and 3 more
How to join the MonsterCare playtest
- Open the game's Steam page with the Request access button. Sign in to Steam if it asks.
- Request access to the MonsterCare playtest there. It's free and doesn't commit you to anything.
- The developer lets players in, often in batches, so it can take a while. Steam emails you when you're in, and the playtest appears in your library.
New to playtests? How Steam playtests work
About MonsterCare
Run a cozy inn at the edge of in-between
What happens to an imaginary friend when the child grows up?
You are the keeper of the Threshold Inn, in the quiet place between worlds where forgotten friends drift once their children grow up. They arrive with their memories gone hazy, not quite sure who they used to be. Care for them and it comes back: cook the breakfast Kruggle keeps asking after, grow the pond-flowers Murmur half-remembers, dress a room until it finally feels like the home they left behind.
The small likes return first, then the child they belonged to, then the heart of why they mattered. No one is ever lost here. When a guest has made their peace, they go home to be imagined again by a new child, and you, the keeper, remember a little more of your own story each time.
Features
- Hand-painted aesthetic, from characters to environments and furniture.
- A day with a shape: paused mornings to take deliveries, cook, and plan; real-time afternoons among your guests; quiet evenings in the lounge.
- Reading people is the puzzle. Guests have forgotten their own tastes, so you listen for what they let slip, watch where they linger, and try things until a memory clicks.
- Cook breakfasts and evening drinks from what you grow and what the delivery monster brings through the fog.
- Tend a garden and greenhouse that stock your kitchen and fill rooms with the flowers.
- Decorate each room to a guest's palette, texture, and the motif tied to the child who dreamed them up.
- Eight hand-authored guests, each a full story from foggy arrival to a fond farewell.
- No fail-state. You never lose a guest, the only ending is the day they are ready to go home.
- A keeper with a secret of his own, which you recover a little at a time across every goodbye.
From the game's Steam page.
