Valentine’s Day is coming up and alas, I wanted to review a dating sim… and alas, here’s a review on my favourite dating sim: Monster Prom! Monster Prom is probably the first-ever competitive dating sim featuring a lot of different characters that all add their own flavour to the game and allow you to experience a plethora of endings.
Developer: Beautiful Glitch Publisher: Those Awesome Guys Genre: Party Game, Dating Sim, Multiplayer, Competitive Release Date: April 27th, 2018 Reviewed on: PC Available on: PC, Switch, PS4, XBOne, XB X/S Copy was purchased.
But first things first, what’s Monster Prom about? Well, Prom Night is coming up and due to our procrastinating a lot, we only have three weeks to find a date! Alas, we go through absurd and rather funny situations to raise our stats, to seduce one of our classmates. And the best part about the game? It’s multiplayer! Play online or locally with up to three other players and ruin each other’s chances with their date in order to have a lot of fun! The developers even advise you to be your worst self. What could possibly go wrong? :)
As mentioned above, you can play the game locally on one PC using one controller or multiple ones or you use Remote Play Together on Steam to play with friends that don’t have a copy of the game. You can also (and it honestly doesn’t matter too much) share your screen and play it that way. The possibilities are endless! When you start up the game, you get to chose between four avatars, three different pronouns (he, she, and they) as well as your username. The characters represent the classic colours you know from party games (blue, red, green and yellow). Then you get introduced to the main cast of the game, aka your love interests, before heading into a personality quiz from one of those teen magazines you may know from your teen days.
The questions in that personality quiz offer a bunch of different choices and are randomly selected. Answering the questions allows you to gain some starting stats that range from fun, charm and boldness to creativity, money and smarts. Some of the questions also allow you to score bonus points with certain characters from the get-go which is a nice addition to this Dating Sim.
When you go for longer or shorter games you have more or fewer opportunities to score points with your love interest. Generally speaking, the “weeks” consist of two day-times where you can go to different areas to increase your stats as well as a lunch break at noon where you can meet up and chat with different characters, including the love interests. During these dialogues and conversations, you have the option of scoring points with one out of two characters, which breathes a bit of life into the game. Usually, in dating sims, you end up only having one-on-one conversations with the cast, resulting in the illusion that people only have you in their life and no other friends, hobbies or interests. In Monster Prom, there are different cliques and people that hang out together, giving the game a more lively feel, even if some of the characters aren’t the liveliest.
Speaking of characters, the cast is amazing. Among the love interests, there is a partying poltergeist called Polly as well as a Yandere-type mermaid princess and a bloodthirsty demon as well as a Hipster vampire. Obviously, there are more characters and the DLC also adds more love interests and side characters, but what I’m getting at is that you don’t have the average joe in there. Every single character is unique in some way and has a unique personality. On top of that, Liam (the Hipster Vampire) is clothed in the Ace-Colours, potentially hinting at him being asexual, which is a nice addition to the game. Generally, I feel like the game is quite LGBTQIA2S+ inclusive as you get to chose your pronouns no matter the character you chose and as it doesn’t matter what character or pronouns you use when it comes to love interests. You can get with all of the cast, even if you’re of the same gender or if you’re using they/them as pronouns, which is something I welcome more than anything. I frankly love that about the game.
On top of that, the game features a bunch of replay-value with a ton of secret endings and events/quest-lines as well as a huge repertoire of dialogue-options and choices to make that all resort to some shock-humour that may not be everyone’s cup of tea. Personally speaking, I loved the humour a lot and really enjoyed exploring different endings but I could see how some people could get offended by some of the dialogue options, which is totally fine.
Despite all the praise, I’d have to say that sometimes it can be a bit frustrating when you notice that you’ve hit the same questline again in the game. The “quests” or events are all randomly selected. Different play-sessions feature a seed, it seems, and hence you can encounter similar dialogue-options or similar quests in different playthroughs, which could end up boring some people. In the same way, you eventually get used to the humour and it doesn’t affect you as much anymore once you’ve played a bunch of the game, but I still am enjoying the game whenever I get to hang out with friends and start up this title.
Apart from that, I also noticed that the soundtrack isn’t that diverse. The score is quite catchy and funky at first but eventually, you feel like it’s playing the same song over and over again. While it may seem like that, the soundtrack actually just features a lot of songs that don’t change too much. They are just very similar resulting in them feeling as if they’re the same.
Despite that, I love this game. I can highly recommend Monster Prom (and the “Second Term” DLC) to anyone looking for a fun party-game or maybe just a dating sim to play on Valentine’s Day (or any other day)! Right now you can get the game at a -69% discount (hehe) for relatively cheap as well, so I’d recommend buying it right now, but I bought it at the full price and haven’t regretted it at all since the purchase. Even if you don’t have anyone to play it with, the singleplayer playthroughs are nearly as enjoyable as the multiplayer ones!
Hope you have a lovely Valentine’s Day (or whatever you celebrate if at all) and I hope you enjoyed this post! Stay safe! And if you want to, I’ll actually be live with some Monster Prom on Sunday, the 14th of February, at around 9 AM GMT over here on Twitch. If you want to, you can hang out a little bit and experience this game with me and the other people in the Crypt.
Cheers!
This post was first published on Indiecator by Dan Indiecator aka MagiWasTaken. If you like what you see here and want to see more, you can check me out on Twitch and YouTube as well. If you find this post on a website other than Indiecator.org, please write an e-mail to me. Thank you!
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