Champion upgrade: Penumbra, Monstrous II or Architect at the forge

About this game

Developer: Shiny Shoe · Publisher: Good Shepherd Entertainment · Platform: PC (Steam) · Art style: Comic & cartoon · Screen type: Character / Unit Detail

More Monster Train screens in the Gallery

What to study

Monster Train upgrades its champion the way it does everything else: as a card choice you can read. The forge screen puts both versions of Penumbra on the table at once, fully statted, so the decision is arithmetic the player does themselves, 50/50 and Trample, or a smaller body that prints gold every time it kills on its floor. Nothing is hidden behind an 'upgrade' abstraction: the path names (Monstrous II, Architect) sit above the cards like titles, the Apply buttons sit below like signatures, and the blacksmith's impatience ('I don't have all day.') is the only pressure the screen applies. It is the deckbuilder's draft grammar, present, compare, commit, applied to the one unit the whole run is built around. Frame at about 0:23 in the Verticality trailer (Steam).

Patterns

How the screen is arranged.

card-choice detail-card versus-panels

Components

Parts on screen.

Card Vitals bar Resource bar Pips

Screen inventory

• two Penumbra champion cards stand side by side under the path names Monstrous II and Architect, each with its own gold Apply button, the same champion's two futures, compared in a single view before either is chosen
• the trade is stated in numbers, not prose: Monstrous II is 50 attack / 50 health with 'Trample.' alone; Architect is 45 / 25 with 'Trample. Slay: +1 gold on this floor.', raw size against an economy keyword
• both cards cost 0 (flame icon, top-left), carry a CHAMPION ribbon, and differ in the pip row above the art, five red pips against four gold, so the upgrade tier is visible on the card face
• the choice is staged as a place: a blacksmith with a hammer over her shoulder says 'I don't have all day.', an anvil stamped IMPco. fills the foreground, and Penumbra itself looms at the left edge watching its own upgrade
• the run's top bar survives into the forge: clan and artifact icons at the left, counters and a '5' at the right, with eye, play and gear buttons, the upgrade never leaves the run's chrome behind

Top 3 colors

#0c0101 27%#230202 19%#7b4c33 16%

Top three palette colors by share. The remaining colors make up the rest.

Source and credit

© Shiny Shoe / Good Shepherd Entertainment, Monster Train screenshot: Monster Train Verticality and Monster Train The Last Divinity trailers (Steam), Good Shepherd Entertainment, shown for design study and commentary. PlayCraft is an unofficial fan project, not affiliated with or endorsed by Good Shepherd Entertainment.

Source tier 2 (publisher-released) · screenshot: Steam store page · Steam page

Source details

Fetched 2026-10-25. verified 2026-10-25: scene-change extraction candidates/v0_0014.png @ 23.3s in the Verticality trailer, MD5 88a806782d216d54c9b2e5f5e0a9061c, from the pipeline Steam HLS stream-copy download (45,899,789 B, MD5 afe7445613a7f1a29adc61855d0e7a26); inspected visually at full resolution (1920x1080 native); the Monstrous II and Architect headers, both Penumbra cards (50/50 'Trample.'; 45/25 'Trample. Slay: +1 gold on this floor.'), both Apply buttons and the 'I don't have all day.' speech bubble all legible; no trailer text or marketing overlay in frame

no published policy found (checked 2026-10-25); fair-use study use, takedown honored within 48h

Rights holders: see Copyright & takedown.