Meg's Monster Review
Meg’s Monster advertises itself as an RPG but in fact, I would say the game plays a little more like an interactive visual novel.
You don’t actually play as Meg, the game starts out with a young girl (Meg) being dumped into an underworld full of monsters with many of them wanting to eat her. She stumbles upon two monsters going about their monsterly business and get pretty scared. It’s here that we realize Meg’s tears have the ability to bring about the end of the world and the two monsters must do their best to calm her down.
Meg becomes particularly attached to one of the monsters and decides to call him Roy. It’s Roy whom we control throughout the game’s relatively short duration and we set off on a mini-adventure to reunite Meg with her mother so she can return home.
The main ‘bosses’ of Meg’s Monster are from the Underworld Council, a group of four monsters who oversee the day-to-day running of the Underworld. There is a neutrality pact between humans and monsters and you’ll often find one of these members taking a keen interest in why Roy is keeping a human child as his ‘pet’. This will result in one or two boss fights and even a couple of lessons on parenting, which Roy very much needs.
Roy is a very strong monster, even amongst the other monsters and has a massive health pool of 99999HP. Throughout Meg’s Monster, Roy will often have to protect Meg from other monsters. While Roy can take quite the beating, Meg will become upset at the sight of Roy being hurt. Battles are quite simplistic and are your cookie-cutter turn-based RPG fare, however, we now have to micro-manage Meg’s emotions which are represented by a much smaller health pool.
While progressing the story we’ll unlock additional Toys such as rocket ships, Crayons etc that can be used in battle to help subdue Meg, they almost act like a potion in a more traditional RPG. Some Toys even have additional bonuses such as increasing Roy’s strength etc.
There’s an overworld map of sorts with a red icon indicating where you need to go to progress the story, often there will be a green optional icon that usually gives you some additional side story content. The optional content is worth checking out, especially as Meg’s Monster only takes around 5 to complete, including some of the side content.
The writing is excellent and definitely is the star of the show, the game had me chuckling to myself on many occasions and it’s fun to see Roy and Meg’s relationship evolve, although I must warn you, the story does get a little sad at points, especially towards the end.
The art direction of Meg’s Monster is great, with large emotive sprites, all in 16-bit style pixel graphics. Although the world is pretty grey and brown there are a few areas that make good use of colour and Meg looks like she could have been taken straight from one of the Mother games.
Conclusion
Overall, Meg’s Monster is a really fun game, the writing is funny and the ‘vibe’ of the world is really nice, just don’t go in expecting the next Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy. Although a little on the short side, Meg’s Monster is a heart-warming story about a girl and her monster and I would highly recommend checking it out for the story alone.
7.5
Steam review code kindly provided by PR Hound