The Cambridge Geek

Monster Prom

I usually make the Girl review dating sims, but this is multiplayer and I've ended up enjoying it more than expected.

You play a student at a school for monsters, and it's three weeks away from graduation. Not only that, but you've still not got a date for the final prom, and you don't want to be the only dateless loser there. So those final few weeks are going to have to be spent on the pull.

The game gives you six potential partners, each of whom have some odd personality trait or quirk, reasonably in line with certain stereotypes. You've got the party girl, teen jock, nerd, ambitious overachiever, princess and the rebel.

Ooh, Cilla, who will I pick?

You win the affection of these people by a range of activities and clever dialogue choices. Each week is broken up into segments, and in each block of time you can go to one of six places in the school (such as the cafeteria or gym). No having a sneaky fag behind the bike sheds though. Each place will give you a little encounter, in which you'll have to choose between two terrible options. Both of these will make some modification to the six different stats you have, while making you more attractive to one of the two characters who appear in each encounter.

These stats are money, charm, boldness and a variety of other things which sum up the complex psychology of the average teenager. Along with dialogue choices, there's also the occasional pop quiz, and a selection of random events. Luckily, all of the possible player characters can choose all of the possible dates, and you can pick your favourite pronoun.

I still don't know what yellow is meant to be.

Admittedly, which one you end up is likely to be decided very early in each game, as when you receive your first couple of popularity points, the person you get them for immediately becomes more likely. However, there's such a range of possible events and dialogues, that you can repeat a fair amount without seeing the same text. (There are over a thousand possible dialogues.)

These multiple dialogues allow the game to end in a variety of ways. The most obvious is success or failure with your chosen paramour, but there are also secret endings to collect.

An example of a perfectly common thing to say in conversation.

It's good fun in multiplayer, with your characters alternating actions and silly little challenges between yourselves to decide the order. It doesn't change gameplay significantly, though you can interfere slightly with the order players' romances.

Overall though, you're playing this for the dialogue. It is delightfully filthy, more than a little surreal, and had both of us giggling. Or, the Girl giggled. I laughed in a hearty manly matter. Excellent party game.

Score:
Score 4

Tagged: Game Dating sim 2D Easy difficulty PC Local multiplayer