Monster in My Pocket
Remember when monsters used to be scary? Before stuff like Monsters, Inc. and Pokémon showed up? Now monsters are just like us: they learn life lessons, they help each other out, and often they're the ones who get scared. Monster Loves You! is a simple and charming choose-your-own-adventure title with RPG elements that takes this angle and runs with it, letting you make all of a monster's important decisions from the beginning to the end of its life cycle. It's definitely on the easy side and can technically be completed in one sitting, but the design encourages multiple playthroughs. Plus, it's got a fantastic soundtrack.Monster puts you in charge of four core stages of a monster's life: childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and elder years. Because the game is in essence an interactive narrative, gameplay comes down to nothing more than decision-making. In each stage you're presented with a series of icons. Tapping one calls up a scenario. For example, as a child monster you and your friends might accidentally break a jug. It's up to you whether to admit to your mistake, cover for the others, or shirk responsibility entirely. Later in life, the events are more about relations between monsters and animals (e.g., helping two insects resolve a dispute over the division of wheat) or proving yourself to your peers (standing your ground when challenged). Everything you do contributes toward five stats: bravery, cleverness, ferocity, honesty, and kindness.
In the latter stages you'll work to build your respect in the monster community, as well as relations between human and monsterkind, but the bulk of the game centers on refining your monster's various personality traits. The issue, as besets all games of this sort, is that you can never definitely guess what the outcome of your choices might be. While unexpected narrative turns are arguably a main draw in the interactive narrative genre, a game should still do its best to establish rules so that gameplay feels fair.
In Monster's second half, whether you succeed or fail is heavily influenced by your stats, but everything up to that point is a guessing game. It's often difficult to tell if an action will count towards bravery or ferocity, honesty or kindness. Furthermore, there are times where you'll be just plain wrong, like an instance in which choosing to stand your ground instead results in your monster soiling himself, causing you to lose bravery. But more often it makes enough sense that something like joining in the bullying of another monster will deplete kindness, while sticking up for him will increase it.
In fact, Monster is easy enough that you can nearly max out one stat before even reaching adolescence. And the game is typically so forgiving that even if you don't get the result you were hoping for from a choice, it'll probably bump up a different stat. There are a few key moments in which it's possible to make enough wrong decisions to end the game prematurely. This is somewhat irritating, but every ending you reach nets you another medal on the title screen.
Unless you're an awfully slow reader, you can get through the game on your first try in forty minutes or less, making Monster all about replay. Figuring out what actions you need to take to unlock all the medals is engaging enough to warrant at least a few playthroughs. Though there are quite a lot of different scenarios to make decisions on, you'll eventually have seen them all, at which point you'll be blasting through entire monster legacies in ten minutes flat.
With gameplay so simplistic, the developers deserve praise for having the sense to put a lot of effort toward presentation, especially on the audio front. The soundtrack strikes a balance between grandiose and light-hearted. The extremely catchy track accompanying the childhood stage, for example, contrasts string instruments against jaunty whistling. The mood works perfectly for a game about entire lifetimes, but one that doesn't take itself too seriously. As the whole game is just reading and making choices, having a great soundtrack to get lost in really bolsters the experience.
The graphics have a cute, playful, cartoonish style that fits well. Based on your decisions, your monster can have a variety of different appearances. There are also backgrounds that show where every scenario takes place. However, these are covered up by text most of the time, so while it's nice that the effort was put in, it's hard to pay the visuals much attention. Another presentation issue is that there's a problem that allows you to see the coding in many of the text boxes. These become rampant near the end of the game, to the point that nearly every text window is filled with all manner of symbols and coding, often running off the side of the screen. This is usually nothing game-breaking, but it looks awfully messy.
Monster Loves You! presents itself as something of a simulation title, but with its focus on reading and responding to various scenarios, it's actually more narrative-driven. It's not exactly earth-shattering stuff and some may find the gameplay too simplistic and easy. But the writing, graphics, and especially music exude a charm that keeps it engrossing for multiple playthroughs.
Monster Loves You! Review Joe Matar
Summary: There's nothing hugely inventive here and it's arguably too forgiving, but the charming concept and presentation may inspire you to give Monster Loves You! at least a few spins.
