Monster autobattler Missmon hits Steam this September

Indie developer MachHabaneroGames and publisher Kodansha have announced a September 8 release date for Missmon on PC. The hack-and-slash strategy game was originally revealed back in April under a vague summer release window, but the teams have finally locked in the exact day players can start building their monster armies.

The core loop revolves around raising 30 different types of monsters to defeat the Demon King. It blends the creature collection of games like Dragon Quest Monsters with the hands-off tactical depth of an auto-battler. You do not directly control the monsters during the action phases. Instead, success depends entirely on how you prepare them before the fight begins. The PC indie space has seen a lot of developers trying to merge monster taming with auto-chess mechanics lately. Super Auto Pets proved there is a massive audience for low-stress tactical creature combat, and this game is trying to capture that same energy with a fantasy dungeon crawler aesthetic.

30 monsters and a grid

Before deploying your squad against enemy waves, you have to optimize their gear and arrange them in specific combat formations. The tactical setup is where the actual strategy happens. Finding synergies between the 30 available monster types and positioning them correctly on the board determines whether they survive the hack-and-slash encounters. A playable demo is currently up on the Steam store page for anyone who wants to test the combat system early.

The game is being published through the Kodansha Game Creators' Lab. The massive Japanese manga publisher, founded back in 1909, launched the Creators' Lab initiative to fund and support independent game developers. They have been steadily building a catalog of smaller, experimental PC titles. Their publishing arm previously handled games like In His Time, showing a willingness to back very different genres. An indie tactical auto-battler fits right into their current portfolio of supporting small teams with weird ideas.

I just want to watch them fight

I am curious to see how much depth the equipment system actually adds to the auto-battling. The developer promises custom equipment options for your units, which adds another layer of math to the pre-battle setup. Games in this genre usually live or die based on how readable the combat is once the AI takes over. If the screen turns into an incomprehensible mess of particle effects, it gets hard to tell if your tactical formation actually worked or if you just got lucky. You need to be able to see exactly why your frontline collapsed so you can adjust the grid placement for the next run.

MachHabaneroGames is a relatively new independent studio, and this is their debut release. Launching an auto-battler requires a lot of careful balance testing, especially when you factor in equipment combinations across 30 distinct unit types. The demo build gives a good preview of the early game, but the real test will be how the difficulty scales in the later dungeon stages when the Demon King's forces start throwing complex enemy formations at you. The full release arrives on September 8.