Munch is an evolutionary adventure of careful dodges and decisions

One of the most underused but effective design choices in action games (and cleverly used in puzzle games) is a transforming and evolving main character. In Munch it’s core to the action-adventure experience.

Imagine yourself as a blob, or a little beasty of some sort, making your way through a dark and dangerous world, foraging for food until you become strong enough to climb off the bottom of the food chain and (carefully, so carefully) take on bigger beasts to absorb their strength. Now imagine that you can send your character up-down and all around a tech tree that ultimately reshapes your body into that of the beasts you’ve been fighting. Want to play a swift, wolf-like creature with a charge attack? You can do it in Munch. Want to play a slow but tough lumbering beast with dangerous pounding attacks? Yeah… you can see where I’m going.

The journey I mentioned is very much the first fifteen minutes of Munch as it currently stands, with plenty more mutations and areas planned for development; It’s only, maybe, a year into development, however, is already shaping up well.

I played through a vertical slice of it earlier in the year and was really impressed with what it already has to offer. The early demo had a somewhat linear path, with canyons and gorges giving way to valleys and clearings, but what stood out to me most was the combat. It was clearly designed with a kind of ‘wind-up’ timing-based battle in mind, and each of the different enemies that I came up against acted and reacted in different ways, challenging me to think on my feet and dodge away from them while I learnt their various quirks.

Munch was dominated with purple, pinks and greens, giving it a slightly alien vibe that promoted careful exploration, which is handy because besides guzzling down your defeated enemies you can also collect the material you need to evolve new skills from plants that are littered around the various nooks and crannies of the map.

It’s very early to say, but Munch is already looking incredibly promising.

Munch is in active, early development. I played a PC build using an Xbox controller, I’m unsure of which platforms it will ultimately release on. You can sign up to their mailing list and check out the demo via their website.