Dude, a Pokemon clone that links you to Twitter and Discord?? WTF??
I came in expecting a single player, offline game.
Now this game NEEDS YOU to have a Twitter and Discord account??

The game BARELY explains anything, not even WHERE to buy healing items and "capture berrys".
Achievements don't even work, not that I care about them much to begin with.
Whatever, I waited long enough.

Thumbs down, NOT RECOMMENDED.

(Perspective: played the final 2023 early access version and wrote a guide for it, played the 2026 full release and left it on overnight to take advantage of a very funny bug for information archival purposes.)

This one's a little complicated.

I'm going to say that if you're looking for a quick and lightweight monster tamer genre game as something to play as a form of comfort food, I would instead do Dokimon (by the same developer).

If you are looking for a piece of work that shows some of the difficult realities of developing games and the ultimate compromises one must make to bring something to the finish line when it's one of your first ever projects, this is an interesting thing that ought to be experienced if you are looking into developing games yourself.

The real star of the package to me is the old "Early Access" build that is available at the time of writing as a launch option. It is very much incomplete, clunky as hell, and filled with ideas that never quite managed to be fully realized - but also charming, in its simplicity and occasional aimlessness in its brief campaign.

Its balance can be very silly in terms of managing 'mana' and trying for big one-shot attacks, and how some Elite Battlers can have weaker line-ups than wild creatures, to the point you're often better off just trading up every time you catch a new creature and forego the hard grind entirely after the first proper boss in Booby Blossom.

You still see the beginnings of ideas and mechanics that never got to be fully explored, and amusing placeholders along with one stand-out potential softlock (save before entering any cave, if it takes you to a blank room reload your save). It abruptly sputters out into a lack of any real conclusion at Blueberry Bay and its dangerous northern woods.

In 2023's final Early Access version, the developer pivoted to using new tools of their own making in order to build a new game, Dokimon, and in 2026 much of its features got backported here, and seeing the comparison is where things get interesting (as a thing to study).

While much of the game's flow is identical, all the way down to wild encounter locations being faithfully transferred (leaving my 2023 guide relevant for hunting creatures), the whole of it feels far more sanitized (even with a particularly glitch-ridden release).

Many little pieces of worldbuilding and references to incomplete features are gone, and the whole of it feels emptier even as it rewards exploration with non-renewable Capture Berries being incredibly precious for capturing creatures. Swapping 'up' creatures still feels the play more often than not. It has also switched to the same engine the developer uses for their other games of the same genre, so the fighting system feels more 'samey' even with the convenience of being able to freely swap movesets with any level-unlocked moves as you'd like.

There is, at last, a final boss places where the game simply halted the last time, offering a form of closure to a somewhat somber final boss theme as if an acknowledgement that there is a bittersweet finish line painted out of the realities of compromise - time, resources, and other commitments that come with being part of a more established development team in 2026 vs. 2021.

It's melancholy, in a way, getting to see the excitement of what could've been early on and then having it tempered by reality - but I feel that's what makes this an interesting experience for anyone interested in seeing just how tough it is to really make something and then have to give up a lot of ideas and compromise to make something "complete." This is something true of every game out there, but Nuumonsters is one of the few to really let you see it so palpably.

So no, don't approach this one as a fun game to play, or some manner of ironic entertainment - but something that captures the difficult realities of game development between its two versions (2023 early access final update vs. 2026 full release).

That's why it gets the thumbs up from me - it has value as that manner of experience.