Fun w/ friends, but shallow and repetive
This is a party game/visual novel where the goal is to court one of several humanoid monsters (ghost, witch, demon, etc.) and eventually ask them out on a date to a meteor shower at the end. The gameplay consists mostly of reading through absurd scenarios involving the player character, love interests, and many side characters, then making one of the two decisions that you think the love interest will like. Each player (up to four) gets two scenarios per week with the number of weeks determined by which length game you decided to play (short is two, medium is three, and full is five). At the end of the two scenarios, everyone gets to choose someone to sit next to at a campfire to have another chat, then pick an alcoholic drink that affects the game in different ways like changing your stats or unlocking new scenarios. At the end of the last week, instead of the fireside chat and drinking, each player chooses who they want to ask to the meteor shower and is either successful or rejected based on how well they did. Player order at the beginning of each week is determined by the game telling you to do something like think of an animal, say the animal out loud, then deliberate amongst everyone on which animal would be the most dangerous if given opposable thumbs.
The game is very raunchy, with curse words and sexual references everywhere. This is certainly not made to be played around children, although there are options in the menu to dial it back. While I enjoyed every scenario the game presented, the repetition set in pretty quickly. For reference, I played one full, one medium, and two short games. At the beginning of your turn, you pick one of only five locations to go to, read the scenario presented to you, and make one of two choices. The same scenarios popped up more than once, and the minigame to decide who goes first only seemed to have less than a dozen variants. On top of that, everyone has five different stats that go up or down depending on the choices you make and the drinks you drink (smarts, boldness, creativity, charm, and fun). However, not only is it usually not possible to know which choice is the correct one to woo your love interest, but the stats themselves didn’t seem to make any difference. I’m sure they affect the endings somewhat, but I couldn’t tell how. This led to a fairly shallow experience filled with a little too much randomness.
Monster Prom 2 is clearly designed to be played multiple times. After all, a party game wouldn’t provide much value if you could only play it once before having to move on to something else. As such, it provides several scenarios including 25 secret endings and 1,196 total outcomes! In the four games I played, I found three of the secret endings and saw 60 outcomes. Given the randomness mentioned earlier, combined with how long each game takes to play, I don’t know how it’s possible for anyone to get every outcome. Even if there was a guide somewhere on every correct decision, the amount of time it would take to see everything would far exceed the amount of time before boredom sets in. I was ready to call it quits after the four games I played, and it would take at least hundreds to see everything. As such, I recommend going into this game with the only goal being having fun with friends and throw the completionist mindset out the window. I did have fun with this game and would recommend it to anyone who enjoys making dirty jokes with their friends, but don’t expect anything deeper than that.