Nookie Monster

Date the cryptids of your dreams in MONSTER PROM.

- Kate Gray

I once had a friend who told me a story about when she was 13. Confronted with the signs of puberty—hair growing in new places, mysterious bleeding that happened every full moon—she was convinced that she was, in fact, a werewolf. Such are the perils of poor sexual health education in England. Of course, she wasn’t a werewolf, but nestled in that anecdote was an interesting little thought nugget: Teenagers are unnervingly similar to cryptids.

Monster Prom is about teens who actually are cryptids: a dorky vampire hipster, a werewolf jock, a Medusalike prom queen, a poltergeist named Polly Geist, a Frankenstein’s monster and an actual demon. Puberty can’t have been fun for this lot. Your task as one of four playable characters is to woo your choice of these teenage nightmares over the course of three weeks, in the hopes that the titular prom night won’t end with you being a rejected loser.

There is a singleplayer option and the option to play with up to four players, which is a much more rewarding experience. Monster Prom has clearly been designed with multiplayer in mind, which makes the solo mode not necessarily bad, but somewhere between a satisfying dating game and a deflated one.