Game of the Month: Monster Prom
May has been a busy month - I have been either at work,
travelling, or hosting guests literally every single day of the thirty-one,
which might be some kind of personal record - but that hasn’t stopped me from
falling head-over-heels for a new video game fandom.
Monster Prom released on Steam on April 27th and
can be variously described as a visual novel, dating simulator, competitive
party game, or a spoof of those genres. For one to four players, it follows the
fortunes of a group of students at Spooky High School, who have three weeks to
convince one of their most popular and attractive classmates to be their prom
dates.
If, like me, you’ve always been intrigued by the aesthetic
of the toy line Monster High, but were way too old when it launched
to enjoy the sanitised and child-oriented cartoon series it spawned, Monster
Prom is something you’ll enjoy. This game is most definitely not for
kids: the dialogue contains frequent sex and drug references and descriptions
of casual violence (they’re monsters, after all); and the artwork
gets a little risqué sometimes, especially when you unlock one of the many
secret endings. The game goes to pains in the opening scenes to inform you
that, despite being in high school, all these characters are over eighteen,
which is probably for the best.
To win the affections of your potential dates, players must
do several things. You have six stats which boost your ability to do well in
social situations, and you can increase them in several ways. You can go to
various locations around the school to receive an automatic +2 boost to the
stat associated with that area (+2 to smarts for visiting the classroom, for
example); while there you’ll run into the character you currently have the
highest relationship with, and a scenario will play out that will allow you to
either further ingratiate yourself with them, or crash and burn, depending on
how you react. Rather than a ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ path to take, your success will
be determined by a stat check; doing well or badly at that check will further
impact on your stats. Players can also buy items to increase their stats from
the ‘shopkeeper’, a fellow student who has a weird and wonderful collection of
objects she’s keen to be rid of in exchange for decreasing your Money stat.
There are also two additional types of event. First there’s
Lunch, when you can choose to either sit at a table with two dateable
characters and enjoy a relationship boost with one without performing a stat
check; or to sit with an NPC and gain a further stat boost. Secondly there are
Weekends, when one player will be approached by another’s love interest, and
have the opportunity to either be a great wingman (earning the other player a
relationship increase and yourself a stat boost) or talk them down (a great way
to get ahead if you’re both interested in the same character, at the cost of no
stat boost and, potentially, a real-world friendship).
The end game is, of course, Prom Night. You ask your chosen
date to the prom and either get the brush-off, or unlock one of the endings for
each character. There’s usually three variants: one in which you have a nice
date but nothing more; one that ends rather sweetly with hints of an ongoing
romance between your character and their love interest after high school; and
one that leans heavily into the “monster” part and usually involves something
unspeakably violent and bloody. They’re all a joy to behond; to be honest, even
the rejections are great fun, as they spin out into a few different
descriptions of scenarios in which your life was absolutely ruined in a grimly
hilarious fashion by failing to get a date to the prom. Better still, the more
you play the more options you unlock (it turns out there is life beyond the six
initial love interests, after all), encouraging replayability, as you’ll need
to do fresh run throughs if you want to take advantage of the new gameplay.
The characterisation and story in this game are a solid
10/10 for me. The sheer variety in the storylines is amazing: at the end of
every playthrough you’re given your global stats, which inform you that there
are 22 secret endings (in addition to several non-secret endings, which aren’t
counted), 388 events, and over 1,300 outcomes from interactions. I have played
six or seven games now, and watched a couple of Let’s Plays on YouTube, and I’m
only just beginning to come across dialogue I’ve seen before. The characters
are beautifully designed from a visual perspective (without once compromising
their freaky monster looks), and are all, in their own ways, extremely lovable.
Even if you don’t end up wanting to date them (I personally could not be left
more cold by the hunky-yet-dumb werewolf jock, for example), you’ll definitely
like them as a friend. Designs on the player characters are spot-on too; while
there’s much less backstory in order to let you bring your own interpretation
to the characters, there are enough cues in their appearances (and minimal bits
of dialogue) to let you tell a story with them rather than just playing as
yourself every time.
The gameplay is perhaps a little shakier than the
storytelling, especially in the competitive elements. I’d give it a 7/10 on my
arbitrary ten-point scale, based on the fact that the competition sometimes
jars with the story of the game at the very end: for example, it seems as
though you can do everything right and still get rejected by your date if
another player has done slightly better than you with theirs, which somewhat
breaks the immersion, because why should Miranda want to reject me just because
my friend managed to get a date with Polly (etc.)? However, I did recently play
a game in which another player was able to get a date despite
me unlocking a secret ending, so perhaps I’ve misunderstood exactly how the
victory metrics are calculated. I would, though, still argue that this is a
slight disadvantage to the gameplay: over half-a-dozen games in, I’m still not
sure what exactly I need to do to win, which makes it fun to
re-play on my own and try to hoover up secrete endings and hidden achievements,
but less appealing to re-play in multiplayer, which is meant to be the main
point of the game.
Only a month after its release, Monster Prom has
a dedicated fanbase who are producing fanart and fanfiction at prolific rates,
and generally communicating with the creators and each other in a shining
example of what a good idea Twitter can be if we’re all nice to each other.
It’s easy to see why: dating sims have often lacked appeal to LGBT+ people,
genre fiction fans, and people who like an alternative aesthetic. Monster
Prom neatly turns all of this around in a way that is pretty well
encapsulated by a single sentence on their Steam page: “Monsters don’t like
boys or girls, they like monsters.” Every character is openly pansexual, and
only a couple of the characters could even vaguely pass for human, so this game
is transcendentally inclusive and representative. It also
avoids the uncomfortable dating sim cliché of viewing your (usually female)
love interests as prizes to be won. Of course, your goal is to woo them; but
whether male, female, or other, they have personality and power of their own,
and they want to date someone who shares their values and interests, not
someone who merely idolises or condescends to them. As a hopeless romantic
trapped in the mind of a hardened cynic, I can confirm I find it super lovely.
I’m hooked. So help me, I’m even shipping, even though I
thought I got that all out of my system a decade ago. (And in case you were
wondering, I’m all about Damien/Amira, a.k.a. Pyromania; seriously, she’s a
fire djinn and he’s an arsonist demon, how were these two not made
to be together?!) Speaking of fangirlish behaviours that I thought were long
behind me, I wrote my first for-public-consumption fanfic in over 10 years to
support Team Damien in a recent poll by the creators (winner gets a new secret
ending; Damien won; I’m a happy gamer). The creators engage with the players
every day and actively encourage them to share their ideas, opinions, and
embarrassing tales of rejection. The community has made fan-art and cosplays,
and is just a joy to follow.
So my advice this month to everyone has been: play Monster
Prom. It costs less than £10 and is almost guaranteed to put a smile on
your face; and you don’t have to stop playing when your friends come round,
because they can play too! Just be prepared for the inevitable clash of wills
when all four of you want to date Polly.
Mobile games
This month I briefly got swept up in the enthusiasm for Harry
Potter: Hogwarts Mystery, a licensed mobile game released on April 25th.
And I mean very briefly. First of all, installing it caused my
phone to complain that it was at 97% storage capacity (up from 77%; this was
a huge app). Secondly, having to pause to do phone stuff
during the character creation process seemed to glitch it, as I was denied the
opportunity to choose my witch’s hairstyle before the tutorial started. (She
ended up with some deeply unappealing white-girl cornrows, to my horror.) The
two in combination were annoying enough for me to uninstall it again.
I then realised my tablet might be able to handle it better.
This idea led me to wonder why Hogwarts Mystery is a mobile
game at all, since an RPG under the Harry Potter licence would
seem a grand enough idea to merit a more major release. It feels like an oddly
huge concept to relegate to mobile-only, and as I discovered, it is perhaps an
unreasonably big game for the limited hardware capacity most people will have
for running it.
So I uninstalled it and went back to playing Lara
Croft: Relic Run, a mobile game which I have yet to see surpassed in the
genre. It features a svelte 140MB storage requirement; is easy to play in short
bursts; has no pay-to-win; and requires no WiFi connection: proof that good
on-the-go gaming can go beyond Solitaire or Snake.
How to get absolutely terrified for free!
SCP: Containment Breach is a horror game made as
part of the collaborative creative writing project SCP Foundation. It was
released in 2012 and the creators are currently working on a Unity engine
remake (a Let’s Play of which initially introduced me to SCP early this month).
The remake is unfinished, but the original game is available for download and
is entirely free. That means the only things you’ll need in order to play
it right now are a computer that can handle a six-year-old
indie game (which you probably have), and the courage to actually play (I can’t
speak for you, but in my case this was a tough system requirement).
This is the scariest game I’ve played in a while; so scary,
in fact, that I was keen to hand the controls over to someone else so I could
hide behind my fingers and mutter “no-no-no-no-no” whenever a sinister sound
effect kicked in. There are a vast number of weird creatures scattered
around SCP, but for me the scariest by far was The Old Man: until I
met him, I didn’t know how much I really didn’t need a video
game of It Follows. The creeping dread of knowing that he’s only
ever a few minutes behind you, and that he can melt through walls and floors to
get at you, is one of the most satisfyingly dread-inducing horror concepts I’ve
encountered recently.
Play if you dare; if you don’t dare, watch some poor
YouTuber suffer for you!
The Sims 3 vs The Sims 4, a.k.a.
“You sometimes have to leave nostalgia in the past.”
This month, I decided to load up The Sims 3 for
the first time in nearly two years. After 55 minutes of agonisingly slow load
times, multiple crashes, having my newly reset and therefore definitely correct
password refused, and admonishment from the game for daring to want to play
using all that paid-for add-on content I own - I was finally
in and ready to go!
I was also remembering why I don’t play The Sims
3 any more. I do still love it, and it’s definitely tied in to some
powerful nostalgia from my student days. Its main draw for me this month was
its powerful character creator (including many supernatural types… why yes,
I was trying to make Sims of the Monster Prom characters).
But sadly I just don’t have the time to try to make it work right now.
I loaded up The Sims 4 instead. I’ve not
bought any of the add-ons yet, meaning that my design options are very limited,
but the load times are blissfully consistent at under five minutes. My monstrous
creations may be vanilla humans under the hood, but they look pretty good, if I
do say so myself; and they were created and moved-in in the same time it
took The Sims 3 to admit me to its main menu.
It may be an unpopular fandom opinion on my part, but for
all The Sims 4 lacks the incredible detail of its predecessor,
it more than makes up for it in accessibility.
Intro to David Cage (Quantic Dream 101)
May 25th saw the release of Detroit: Become Human,
the first David Cage/Quantic Dream game in five years. I had no first-hand
experience of David Cage’s games until I played Detroit’s “The
Hostage” demo this month, but it got me instantly hooked. Unfortunately, the
circa £50 price tag means I won’t be playing the full game straight away, but
I’m taking the opportunity to finally pick up a couple of his games that have
been on my wish list for a few years: Heavy Rain and Beyond:
Two Souls.
Heavy Rain was well-received upon its release in
2010, but now it’s better remembered for the many memes it generated than for
its genuinely immersive interactive storytelling. Then, in 2013, Beyond:
Two Souls did nowhere near as well critically as it should have done,
given its pedigree as a Heavy Rain follow-up starring actual
famous actors Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe. It’s probably fair to say that David
Cage’s reputation isn’t quite as glowing now as it was six or seven years ago,
but after playing the demo I really believe Detroit: Become Human is
going to be the game that changes that.
I’ve started my pre-Detroit revision session
with Heavy Rain. I’m about one-fifth of the way through now and I’m
enjoying it a lot: all four player characters have been introduced now, and I’m
finally starting to get the hang of the controls. I hope to have a lot more to
say by the end of next month.
