Not all vile creatures walk around only at night in this world. Spooks and beasts may be walking around outside right this very instant. You would never know that they were hiding terrible secrets unless their hunger just happened to get to them while you were around. Or if they happened to run into another one and started fighting. That started happening a lot.
The Monster Within is a Roguelike deckbuilder centered around monsters with human forms going around attacking each other for verious petty, poorly talked over, innane, cruel, and/or stupid reasons. You'll play as one of 10 monsters who then gets into a fight with 3 other monsters trying to claim victory for various reasons. Gameplay wise you're expected to play your whole hand each turn. The resources you're trying to get aren't for actually playing the cards but instead for either attacking and defending or for buying new cards for your deck each turn. The second difference is as your health gets lower the cards available both for you to buy and the ones that come pre-installed in your deck start swapping over to more powerful, more unique cards that will take different resources to buy or, in rare cases, use.
There may or may not be parallels with a popular game amongst those of certain sensual interests.
Tropes: Maybe you can try Talking the Monster to Death with these cards.
- Adaptational Heroism The character you pick will often display their less violent, more restrained self when they're the player character, if they have one. The vampire isn't looking to start problems but will gladly clean up enemies, the blob isn't nearly as hunger driven, the plant's human eating isn't shown so much as her devotion to plants.
- Alternate Identity Amnesia: The only and expected victim is The Werewolf. The rest of the monsters are implied to know very well what they did/do when transformed, even if they behave differently, while the werewolf seems to forget everything most of the time.
- Ambiguously Brown: The Cultist is a young girl who is a lighter brown than The Wraith or The Plant. She's either light skined or mixed compared to them.
- Ambiguous Situation:
- The Parasite, when played as, banters with their human host who is clearly doing the work. Either player or enemy he's still a pushy salesman who makes a lot of quips about his job, such as noting his lawyer is worse than getting beaten up, but still seems to accept his fate to the parasite. How much has he been manipulated by his infestation and does the parasite have the memories of the host?
- The Werewolf has several scenes where he mentions his gang, The Wolfpack, ditched him when they were supposed to meet up. It's never followed up if, as a high-school gang, they legitimately ditched him as teens do, if they saw him transform and are actively avoiding him, if the Werewolf killed them and he's unaware, or least likely but still possible given the name of the gang, they're other werewolves who got felled in the monster frenzy.
- Crapsack World: It's unclear how far this goes but it's show pretty well that civilans aren't exactly in good standings in this world. You're shown the perspectives of both The Blob, a high end boss for a big corperation, and in a letter to The Scientist, a high school teacher, that they aren't taking rampant and violent monster sightings and attacks nearly seriously enough. The Blob complains about his workers just needing motivation before deciding to clear out monsters himself just to save some money. The Scientist reads off that teenagers getting mauled and wounded should count as an "unexcused abscence", although we only see her reaction to this decree and she's clearly not a good person. It's hazy how much of the other horiffic behavior seen is just how society functions or if it's monsters being monsters.
- Critical Status Buff: One of the gameplay pillars. The more HP you lose the more powerful your arsenal becomes as your unique monster skills start showing up in the shop as well as other less savory methods of dealing with the opposition. While the daylight, or high health, cards have some utility the cheapest beast, low hp, card deals 2 damage and gives 1 defense for a single beast point while cheap daylight cards give one defense and daylight for 2 daylight points.
- Enemy Within: While done to varying degrees in the other character's stories, being unclear if their more violent aspects are truly their own, The Werewolf is clearly shown to be an alternate personality to the greaser who's cursed. He doesn't renember what the wolf does and when they do acknowledge each other the wolf is trying to get him to accept his role as a hunter and beast which he clearly dislikes, even if he accepts the need to kill other monsters.
- For Science!: Basically what makes The Scientist a monster is her devotion to scientific knowledge above everything else but her own life.
- Humans Are the Real Monsters: Overall an Averted Trope, with the monsters being people eaters who show varying signs of remorse in monster mode but usually won't stop either way, but the Mad Scientist character is heavily implied to be fully human rather than the mythological figures the rest of them are and is the most unrepentant about bothering others. Despite clearly lacking empathy or morals all signs point to any blood on their particular hands is from self defense or willful negligence, several conversations implying she watched monsters kill humans to take notes but none imply she kills other humans directly.
- Mistaken for Prostitute: In The Blob's version of the stage 1 vampire fight he ends up hitting on what he thinks is a hooker dressed up as a Hospital Hottie. He's clearly upset with himself when he's informed she's a legitimate medical worker that happened to still be in uniform and he a made a rather big mistake.
- Multiple-Choice Past: Some cutscenes show that the only solid things about characters are their affliction, their age and occupation, and their personality. The Scientist, for example, calls the Werewolf "Billy" in the first and second stage intros. In the first chapter he answers to the name readily, in the second he points out that it's not his name.
- Obliviously Evil: The Warlock is a preacher who has a crisis of faith and gets taken advantage of by a cat spirit pretending to be the voice of god. Other characters' conversations imply he acquires a not insignificant bodycount under the direction of the cat despite truly trying to rid the world of evil.
- Power Incontinence: While various examples spring up for the most part there appears to be some form of control. The Plant does explicitly suffer this. Her remarks in later chapters indicate she has no known way of turning back to a human once her true nature starts showing and also implies she was unfamiliar with her true nature as a monster but was able to use its power.
- Punny Name: Monsta Co. Has two of the ten monster on its staff, The Blob and The Parasite, and both are highly dedicated to the business in their respective storylines.
- Puppeteer Parasite: The Parasite. It's unclear how much puppeting is going on but the human host is shown to be the one in control while he is either mentally restrained into accepting the parasitic consumption of his body or the parasite picked a nearly perfect host to dominate and eat from.
- Rich Bitch: The Shapeshifter is this head to toe. She's clearly in control in both forms, is well dressed, and considers everybody who isn't her servant beneath her time. You either get passive anger or murderous interest from her.
- Shows Damage: A variation. Rather than showing injuries or frailness with lower hp they will instead start to turn to their true monstrous form. Both player and enemy do this but with the player it's one long string of changes before you lose while the enemy will, upon their true form being reached, shift over to a boss fight where they start throwing their full powers at you.
- Skipping School: The Werewolf, being a teen delinquent, does this. In one of his exchanges with The Scientist she points out he's doing this as she's his science teacher. He then points out that, as his teacher, it's even wierder she's doing it.
- Soul-Sucking Retail Job: Whoever the Parasite's host is has clearly lost a lot of himself to his job, although door to door instead of a retail store, even before he became infested. His responses and general demeanor are all indicate the way the job treated him made him very, very hollow inside with the only gray area being how much his acceptance of his death at the hands of the parasite is his own actual feelings and how much is the parasite doing something to him.
- Villain with Good Publicity: The point of sunlight AKA human form cards. The sunlight phase of the fight is generic to all characters but the cards themselves center around getting dirt on the other monster, making yourself look good, taking legal action, or lowering the opinion of the other monster. It's only once you enter the night and beast cards that they start resembling trying to directly take out the opposition.
- The parasire revolves around this. His unique cards are all sunlight or moonlight cards that lose their power if he puts a beast card in his deck. The point is he works best pretending to be human.
- Weakened by the Light: Not a direct gameplay mechanic but instead a solid way to hurt bosses. Once in the boss phase you can no longer buy more cards using your sunlight, moonlight, and beast points. The game insteads turns them an alternate form of attacking that can be resisted depending on the monster. Sunlight cards, if you build them right, are the only resource that can easily multiply into massive numbers.
- The wraith in particular has a dislike of sunlight both as a boss and a playable character. As a boss he commonly enters a stance that only allows sunlight to hit him. As a character he gets cards that help weed out sunlight cards in his deck and does his best when juggling moonlight and beast cards.
