Monster Prom 2: Monster Camp Review
The success of the Monster Prom multiplayer dating sim has spurred a following that is taking us into the summer of love. Monster Prom 2: Monster Camp puts you on a bus full of spooky and wacky monster teenagers and sends you to camp, where your goal is to get a meteor shower date. Fewer things are more romantic than stargazing, and you only have a few weeks to do some magic.
This time at Monster Camp …
Monster Camp’s single player mode gives you the choice between a short 30 minute match and a longer 60 minute run. It’s primarily a narrative game with little to do other than reading dialogue and clicking, so most of your participation will include answering multiple choice questions. When you board the bus that takes you to the summer camp, you’ll encounter six different eligible monsters, all with quirky artwork and personalities. After receiving introductions of these characters, listening to some contextual storytelling, and packing your backpack full of items like pocket therapists and competitive tarot decks, the first question will be asked.
Your answer to this question pairs you with the romantic suitor that best matches your answer, and this match will be the star of your story moving forward. The first question I got asked me what my favorite animal was and of course I said badgers, because they don’t give a shit. I immediately got on with Damien; the hot and mean devil with a love of chaos and destruction.
While there are six different eligible monsters, there’s little you can do to control which one you’ll end up with. You will have the option to sit next to others around the fire at night, but the conversations triggered are generally platonic and will rarely show up in your scenarios during the day. It’s a bit of a shame that the game pushes you in one direction with no way to divert you, but it is effective in making you go back to play more rounds to experience new characters.
Graveyard Smash
Chapters in Monster Camp are divided into several “weeks”, which are really just mornings, afternoons and nights spent around a bonfire. During the day, you can choose from five locations on the map, which include locations like the lake, the woods, and the camp dome. From there, scenarios of different involvement will be activated. Some places will require a long-winded dialogue where you can make choices, and others will simply award you points just for the existing which go to your stats.
Your stats are made up of categories like Intelligence, Boldness, Creativity, Charm and Fun, and the way you respond to different scenarios can significantly enhance or reduce them. Since your romantic interest is at the heart of almost all of these events, you’ll need to pick the answers they like best and they’ll give you stat points in return. I found it was pretty hard to pick the wrong answer, but in general you aren’t even asked too many questions to begin with. Most of this game is light and lazy sitting, so don’t expect very exciting gameplay.
Your most active participation happens around the fire. After choosing a spot and chatting with the other monsters nearby, you’ll play a drinking game. It takes a while to understand exactly how the minigame works because you aren’t given a full explanation up front, but it’s actually quite simple. A tab with different drink cards will be shown and you will have to select a drink without really knowing what it is. Other players will try to knock you out of your box, and once the time limit is reached, whatever card you land on will be the drink you receive. Each drink has different stats and the more you play, the more familiar you will become with the ones you want to try. It’s a nice change of pace from the narrative nature of the rest of the game,
Replayable adventure
If you like storytelling games or dating sims and want one that you can play online too, Monster Camp offers a plethora of different scenarios and stories that you will almost never experience twice. I recommend playing it on a smaller screen rather than something like an ultrawide monitor, because the huge text size will make you scan back and forth at a tiring level and the font is a little hard to read. This looks sharp, but for a reading-based game, a more delicate font and options for resizing the text would be easier on the eyes, especially for those who sit near large monitors.
There are nearly 350 different events to experience, not including secret events you can discover and over 1,000 total achievements to watch. You’ll likely find great replayability if this is a genre you like, although I wouldn’t recommend it for those who generally enjoy more active games. Simply put, Monster CampIt puts you in control of very little, and sadly, it doesn’t even require your full attention. As an experiment, I distanced myself for one of my short periods; clicking through all the dialogues as fast as possible and selecting the answers based on the few facts I knew about the character. I also entrusted my fate with full control of the drinking game CPUs and finished the race with flying colors. It’s not a good reason for this game that it’s almost too easy to succeed, but even crossing the finish line isn’t what people should be looking for as a motivation to play.
Monster Camp in a nutshell is about enjoying the story, admiring the wacky graphic novel style graphics and building your stats over the course of the summer to make sure you have enough points to conquer your monster and secure a meteor shower date . The dialogue is characterized by a great vulgarity and is certainly not meant for the eyes of children. It’s outrageous and hilarious, and the scenarios are over the top as you’d expect. It’s about savoring the journey and for most fans of this genre there is a lot to enjoy.
*** Revision code for PC provided by the publisher. ***
Good
- Hilarious dialogue
- Fantastic exaggerated graphics
- Tons of scenarios and results
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The bad
- The game is too passive
- The character is a bit abrasive
- Little control over who you woo
