by Brittany B. | 07/22/2020

Are you someone who is looking for a fun game to play by yourself or with up to three other friends? Have you ever wanted to play a competitive dating simulator? Are you at all into monsters (or the furry community)? Well, hold your butts because Monster Prom is the game for you if you answered yes to any of those questions!

CONTENT WARNING: Monster Prom is highly inappropriate. This review is safe for work but the game itself is not safe for all ages.

You have 3 weeks to get a date for Monster Prom! Go through absurd and funny situations, raise your stats and seduce one of your classmates. Beautiful art, bold, unapologetic dialogue and hard choices make up this Multiplayer (1-4 players) Dating Sim. Be your worst self.

Monster Prom is a visual novel video game for Windows, macOS and Linux and Nintendo Switch developed by Beautiful Glitch and published by Those Awesome Guys.

• LOTS OF FUNNY AND ABSURD SITUATIONS
  Get into the groove of the local monster high-school through hundreds of events, each one with 4 possible outcomes, which adds up to over 1000 specific situations.

• CHARACTERS EASY TO FALL IN LOVE WITH
  Meet and interact with your 6 classmates, beautifully drawn by Arthur Tien and with funny personalities that are developed through hundreds of dialogues written by Cory O’Brien, Maggie Herskowitz and Julián Quijano

• CHOICES THAT MATTER
  Your choices affect future situations and they can let you unlock new and potentially very secret endings. Some of them are related to specific love interests!

• A SHOP FULL OF SECRETS
  Unlock new items in the shop to aid you in your high school adventures or uncover new events and endings! A penguin mask, a spork, a slave, an erotic fanfic about dragons, and many more!

• POST-MODERN SLICE OF LIFE
  A beautifully developed universe with diverse fashion, outfits, style and quirks, set in the modern world of love with all the trimmings: selfies, dating apps, d**kpics, raves, emojis and more.

• FREEDOM OF CHOICE
  Monsters don’t like boys or girls, they like monsters. The game experience is unaffected by gender or sexual orientation, since finding love is already hard enough.

• CONTENT WARNING!
  Although it hasn’t been rated yet, Monster Prom features mature themes, naughty words and some objectively bawdy scenarios, not suited for the sheepish or the faint of heart. Please bear this in mind before playing.

This game is wild, raunchy, highly inappropriate and if that’s your kind of thing it will have you rolling with laughter as you play by yourself or with friends. If that’s not your kind of thing, I would recommend you steer clear of this game all together. Monster Prom isn’t your average dating sim. It takes all of the tropes associated with dating sims and turns the dial far past max into ludicrous scenarios.

You can play in multiple ways – if you’re just playing by yourself, you can choose to play a short (30 minutes) or long (60 minutes) game. If you’re playing online or local multiplayer, you have the option to play a short (90 minute) or long (120 minutes) game as you go through the various turns of all the players with their respective prom date acquisition shenanigans. I honestly prefer to play with a group of friends because the ridiculousness of the game is turned up to eleven when you see what is happening all across the school, especially if you have two players who are trying to romance the same monster companion. But the single player version is still full of laughs.

There are four player characters you can choose from when you start the game:

The default names (from left to right in the picture above) are Oz/Yellow (a living shadow), Amira/Red (a djinn), Brain (a zombie), and Vicky/Blue (a Frankenstein’s monster). Regardless of who you pick, you’re able to change the screen name and pick pronouns:

And not only do you have those three options, you can romance whoever you want! There are no gender restrictions for any of the romanceable characters. The game starts out with the player taking a magazine quiz to establish their stats for the game and it also gives you a bonus with one of the romanceable monsters and sort of fast tracks you to them as your target date for prom.

I cannot overstate how highly inappropriate and raunchy this game is. There are lines about indentured servitude, drug use, being drunk at school, casual sex, casual murder, using corpses as fashion accessories and so much more. It is all in good humor (the tag line of the game is “be your worst self” after all) and all of the characters in the game are given ages, none of whom are younger than 19 years old. Everyone is legally adults in the game despite it being a high school setting.

The more you play the game, the more things you unlock, whether it is secret romanceable monsters or new items to buy from the cat NPC who sells stuff in game that can create interesting in game events and take your game on a wild side story. The inclusion of unlocking stories and items makes it so that the game has amazing replay value and will continuously make the player laugh through each play-through. And, unlike other choice games, the changes are drastic. Not just a small scene changes here or there – no. I have played this game at least ten times through and have never had the same ending. I’ve had the same scene occur once or twice, but that hasn’t been the case since I purchased the Second Term DLC. And even when I have the same scene occur the game is still uniquely different, with different events and scenes with other monsters or different misadventures that you and your potential prom date go on as you try to impress them.

One of the things that makes me laugh quite a bit in this game is the narrator (who, if you’ve purchased the Second Term DLC, is a secret unlockable romance option) because their dialogue is constantly breaking the meta of the game to talk about how meaningless the stats are or calls out tropes that the game is or isn’t perpetuating. The game is written very well and doesn’t take itself seriously in the slightest. It’s a game that was made to make fun of the genre and to make the players laugh and that is exactly what it does in my opinion. It has all sorts of variety that will make you cringe, laugh, and get mad right alongside the monster you’re trying to romance (we’re looking at you, Leonard who is written like an internet troll incel who happens to be a Kappa).

Not only is the game written well, it is gorgeous to look at. It has a distinctive artistic style and promotes the artwork of the game both in game and makes additional art available in the gallery the more the player plays the game and unlocks pictures. Whenever a character speaks, they appear in full body about the narrative text box but there is also a head-shot of the character speaking next to the text box, too. The poses don’t change but the monster’s clothing and expressions change (clothing change depending on the season and usually a few times within the same play-through and the expression change along with the dialogue that is happening for better tonal emphasis). It is highly stylized but gorgeous in its own right. Here is just a small taste of the artwork in the game:

Playable Character Variants

Romanceable Monsters

Other artwork from the game:

All images featured are property of the Monster Prom and were pulled directly from the game’s gallery.

Monster Prom’s fan community is also amazing. There is fanart galore of this game and the developers share a lot of it on their Twitter page and make some of it viewable in the game, too! If you’re looking for a game to spend a few hours with that will make you laugh on your own or in a small group of friends, then this game will sufficiently scratch that itch. Think of it as the Cards Against Humanity of dating sims. It’s raunchy. It’s unorthodox. It’s a bit weird. But ultimately, it’s all laughs. Or if you’re looking for a game that will have a fun online presence to join in on some extra fun, then this is also the game for you!

Rating:
5 out of 5 rainbows

Recommended Reader: Mature individuals who are not easily offended who are looking for a game that will make them laugh while playing it alone or with friends. Or mature individuals who are looking to connect online with each other over a video game (there is no in game audio chat but the game uses minimal resources, so you can have a skype or discord call going simultaneously; it’s also got a local play option, so you can screen share online and have one designated player manipulating the controls if your group only has one copy available to them).

Follow more from the Monster Prom team on their Twitter!