My Gaming Diary: May 2018

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.