When Monster Prom arrived, I couldn’t get enough of it. I played it with friends a lot, sometimes I played it by myself. The characters and writing felt fresh and enticing, even when they were just regurgitating culture references and memes. At some point Beautiful Glitch, the developers, announced a whole series of Monster games, with first being Monster Camp. And, back then, I couldn’t have been more excited.
Exactly what was expected
Monster Camp, on the surface, is exactly the same as its predecessor. A multiplayer dating game where over the course of a few weeks (separated into rounds) players try their best to gain affection of one of the love interests. A clever twist on the dating game genre, accentuated with the fact that, as the name implies, everyone is a monster, including you.
This allows for interesting writing, as instead of going on traditional dates and dealing with standard love problems, the players might have to help a demon (a very hot one) convince a witch to let her join the coven. Each situation is usually dealt with by letting a player choose one of two options, and either one can succeed or fail depending on their attributes that are upgraded during the game.
There are also occasional rounds where you just have to choose one of the two characters sitting together with no chance of failure, only a chance at love. But someone else might want to also sit at that spot, so it’s worth it to have a first go, which is chosen at the end of each round through a clever meta-game where the players decide who goes first.
Which means, as you play, other than competing with the game, you have to compete with other players if they also decided to go after the hot, non-binary grim reaper. Successfully managing situations gains you bonuses and fails lowers them, so sometimes the game can snowball out of control in a way that winning seems impossible.
But, unlike Monster Prom, there are now ways to counteract that.
Once in a while a party takes place where Juan the Small Magical Latino Cat will serve drinks, but because he’s only a magical apprentice, they can have crazy effects. Some can change your stats while others mess with the meta aspect of the game, changing the normal backgrounds to classical paintings.
More Joy please
But the normal backgrounds are just as beautiful. The whole game consists mostly of background and characters that are talking, as it is a dating game, but both are amazing.
Because the game takes place in a summer camp players will visit places such as the nearby woods, local lake or the ominously named Camp Dome. Each playable character (as there are 9 now) has their own illustrations for each place, and every love interest has multiple outfits that can be unlocked or bought as DLC.
And the characters are all great — knowing that this is a sequel, Beautiful Glitch chose to only keep two of the main love interests from the first game. The rest are either side characters from the first game or completely new characters. Everyone has a unique personality, likes and opinions on certain things.
And even though they can all be absolutely horrendous, it’s hard not to love them all.
It’s hard not to love new side characters as well. Using the new setting of a summer camp new monsters can be met straight from horror tropes — such as a slasher monster who’s really incompetent at it, a ghoul lady (delivering pizzas) and a minotaur from a nearby rival camp who’s incredibly horny.
Diminishing returns
I really enjoyed the first few playthroughs of Monster Camp, especially since it was a while since I played the first part. But as time went on, my interest in it kept waning. While it was still fresh, and added a lot of needed quality of life stuff (such as an option to remove sexual content or toilet humor) I think I was just over-Monster’ed.
It was certainly not the fault of the game, because I still play it from time to time — more so mine for overexposing myself to the previous part so much that this one just felt like a content update more than a whole new game.
If you are someone that enjoys silly, somewhat crude and horny humour Monster Camp is a great get, as it is a definite upgrade to the first game. But if you played a lot of Monster Prom before, this might just feel like more of the same.
Also, Joy is the best character, and if you disagree you can go kick rocks.
Monster Camp is available on Steam and GOG.com on PC, MacOS and Linux, as well as on Nintendo Switch.
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