• Monster Prom
  
• Developer- Beautiful Glitch
  
• Publisher- Those Awesome Guys
  
• PC
  

Combining elements of adventure games and dating sims, Monster Prom focuses on the experience of collaborative storytelling. Along with Moon Hunters, it follows the legacy of The Yahwg, which drew the blueprint for the intimate style of story told here. Unlike the other two, Monster Prom isn’t concerned with the coming disaster of a fantasy world, but a high school prom. This sets up Monster Prom up as a comedy game, with an irreverent tone that pokes fun at high school archetypes, movie monster mythology, and prep school institutions. It’s a fun synthesis, and when it hits it had me laughing in disbelief, but it also becomes a source of wild tonal shifts that break its stride.

There’s a sense that Monster Prom wants to be something that everyone can get in on. The recontextualization of dating sim elements, the familiar high school setting–it immediately communicates the beats of the story and lets you find fun ways to get there. You’ve got two weeks to decide how you spend your time, and how you’ll win over your sweetheart. It’s easy to understand, and regardless of how successful you end up being it has enough variation in events to make it interesting and surprising.

Success, unfortunately, leans too much into an understanding of dating sims to give a good experience for everyone. Playing it with my partner I always ended up with a date by the end of a round, recognizing immediately who the story had made available for me as a date and singlemindedly pursuing them. My partner played it more expressively, trying to explore the boundaries and following characters that weren’t part of the eligible crew. Her interactions were probably more interesting, even if she didn’t see as many character story lines through. Of course, she’d end up without a date every time. It reveals a surprising systems bias to Monster Prom, and while that’s kind of inherent to the construction of games like this, it’s easy to see people not familiar with those expectations might end up enjoying it less.

It also creates a problem where you can end up feeling locked into the story line of characters you dislike. In my second playthrough I aimed to romance Miranda, the mergirl princess, only to find her to be aggressively despotic. I ended up with Scott, the wolfman jock, the second of the pair the game had offered me, which provided a lighthearted story line I was glad to see through, but she ended up as the foil to him in every scene. 

It became increasingly uncomfortable to see Scott’s absurd story line played against Miranda, with him asking advice for what to do as a king of furries who’d begun worshiping him (yes, really), while Miranda asked you to condone her desire for genocide. There’s a kind of casualness which Miranda talks about oppressing her people and wiping out another race that really struck me the wrong way. Monster Prom attempts to be detached from reality, but it brings in just enough to make its treatment of subjects like this feel insensitive. This was only exasperated as I played more of it.

As much as I appreciated how Monster Prom leans into the macabre, it goes a too far a little too many times. It wants to treat everything with a sort of flippancy to create an outrageous spectacle of heavy topics like death and societal violence, and when it approaches those with genuine care it results in something both funny and unexpectedly heartfelt. It plays with familiar archetypes and plot beats, but fleshes them out in unexpected ways given its time constraints. Too often, however, it leans into a nasty streak that sours those wonderful moments. Playing it repeatedly only shows more of that side, and if you’re unlucky, can even sour the image of the characters you’d previously had, making you feel gross about previous playthroughs.

The experience of Monster Prom feels a bit like hanging out with a group of people who you really like. You have a good time almost every time, except that there’s one awful dude who can’t read the mood and keeps ruining the conversation with edgy, inappropriate jokes. You keep hanging out with these people, because you genuinely like them, but every time this dude chimes in you wonder why it is that your friends keep him around. And you begin to wonder if his shitty values reflect something about the company you keep.