👹 Review: Monster Loves You - "a charming, if shallow monster’s tale" 👹 #GameDev #IndieGame

Game Title: Monster Loves You

Format: Steam (PC)

With its charming, colourful visuals and humourous text, Monster Loves You raised a chuckle or two and a few smiles from me but I couldn’t shake the sense that this feels like a mobile port due to its repetitive nature and shallow depth.

Monster Loves you puts you in the role of a new-born monster, literally born from a primordial soup. Via multiple choice responses, you shape the character of your monster and in doing so decide whether he is kind, ferocious, honest, smart etc., all represented by in-game bars that show the facets of your personality. As your monster grows, he will move into his own home before eventually moving beyond his hometown and even venturing into the human world, although this is represented in static images and text and so isn’t particularly immersive, although the music alters with each chapter.

Beyond making choices, there is no other interaction with your monster or the world around it. Yes, the other characters that get introduced throughout play are cutesy and, considering the briefness of the in-game text, well-drawn. 

The main issue I had (apart from the music, which, whilst chirpy and fun, repeated on a short loop) was that I couldn’t shake the feeling that this seemed meant for brief dips on a mobile device as opposed to being a fully-fledged Switch title. I couldn’t decide what the target demographic was, it was too cutesy and simplistic for adults, too wordy for young children and too basic for older kids. 

Yes, I enjoyed clicking through for a few minutes and getting to understand the monster world, but as it dawned on me that I was just making choices which felt arbitrary as all that happened was, at a couple of specific points in the game, it would branch into one or two places, feeling a bit too much as if my interactions weren’t having an impact on the narrative. 

The game is designed to be played multiple times to get all possible endings but I can’t see any reason to play through again as most choices would be identical to previous run-throughs.

Summary

Monster Loves you isn’t a bad game, it’s just so simplistic that it feels more suited to a tablet than a Switch, I had an issue with my save game being corrupted as well, resulting in me needing to reset my monster but I’m not sure how widespread this issue is. 

Essentially an interactive story-book, if you have a young child I can imagine that it would be fun to work through this, reading out the choices and playing together, but even then, after one or two play-throughs of the story there’s not enough here to provide longevity.

💧❄️ RATING: MELTING ❄️💧

Ratings Explained

ICE COOL (Great Game Recommended)

MELTING (Recommended with reservations, one to consider if you are a fan of the genre)

MELTED (Not A Recommended Purchase)