If, at the beginning of this generation, you’d told me that not only would the classic point-and-click adventure be back in full swing, but that it would be one of the better represented subgenres on the Switch, I’d have thought you were daft. Yet here we are, indeed, elbow deep in more than just a fair number of them as a whole. But also with a fairly broad range of styles from the obvious like classic LucasArts-inspired ones, to those that have taken on an even more old-school and more serious approach.

Monolith falls into the latter category, taking on the less represented sci-fi genre with your character finding herself stranded after crash landing on an unknown world. Worse, you’ll also have to contend with her memory being a bit scattered, but that does make for a convenient means of keeping the game’s story revealing itself slowly. As these sorts of adventures go, depending on what you’re looking for, there’s quite a bit that works well. While it’s common to gripe about odd puzzles and inventory management decisions, I’d say this fares a little better than most. Its approach is also more modern, thankfully allowing you to highlight all spots within the current space that you can interact with, giving you plenty of backup if you miss something, though you can opt not to use it if you’d like to figure it all out on your own.

Where it doesn’t fare as well tends to be where the voice acting and dialogue are concerned, but confusingly enough it’s a very mixed bag. On the one hand, CORE, the robotic helper you find pretty early on, provides a fair amount of wit and levity. On the other hand, pretty well everyone else, including your main character, don’t fare nearly as well… I suppose making for a bit of an ironic situation. There’s just a wooden clumsiness in the delivery and even the dialogue as written in places, so I’m not positive whether there were translation issues or what, but the more you tend to lean into these titles for their storytelling the less likely you are to be satisfied.

In the end, it left me with mixed feelings. Given that there aren’t too many sci-fi adventures like this available on the eShop, there’s a novelty factor that’s hard to discount. That said, even if you’re a genre fan there may be limits to your patience depending on your level of expectation. Keeping in mind the somewhat modest price, there’s also some room to be understanding, you just may want to give some gameplay a watch to get a feel for the experience, and then decide whether it will suit you well enough to be worth the investment.