Review: Monster Prom 3: Monster Roadtrip: I Can’t Wait to Get on the Road Again

Personally speaking, I’m not the biggest fan of road trips. You have to be the driver and deal with stiff foot joints or be a passenger and resign yourself to having no control over the music. Don’t even get me started on gas prices. Fortunately, in the world of Monster Prom, half of the sapient species don’t have joints that can hurt, the music is always great, and the gas is somehow magical! With those factors in mind, the newest Monster Prom game, Monster Roadtrip, is objectively better than your typical real-life roadtrip from the get-go, and it only gets better.

review conclusions

• bloody hilarious
• Lots of new and original character art and voice lines to admire.
• Surprisingly attractive resource management system
• Very easy to use, concise tutorials and useful customization.
• Some of the options are still a bit obtuse
• Some features missing at launch
• Final Score: 9/10

Packing snacks, making tracks

The premise of Monster Roadtrip is slightly different from previous Monster Prom games. Instead of acting for the express purpose of putting the moves on one of your partners, the goal of the game is to ensure that the road trip is a success. You and up to three of your friends join Scott and Polly on their journey through the desert, stopping at one of two options each turn.

You have six resources to watch out for as you travel: hype, magic, mind, money, soul, and stamina. Participating in events at each stop will increase and decrease these resources based on the choices you make; if any of the resources drop to zero, the whole journey is ruined, but you also need to build a specific resource to get to the end of the game.

One thing I immediately appreciated about Monster Roadtrip was its transparency, especially compared to the previous two games. You get a clear view of which of your resources might be affected at each stop (unless the game deliberately skips it to keep things interesting), and the type of event you choose presents clear instructions on What your resources will be affected. You still need to make an educated guess about which event options will affect your resources and how, but that’s the main draw of the core gameplay loop, so that’s fine.

cracking up on cracked pavement

If you’ve played any of the previous Monster Prom games, you probably have a good idea of ​​what kind of writing to expect. The wacky, irreverent humor is back and I can’t get enough of it. In my first race, I stopped at a biker bar and started a fight for fun. My options for a fighting opponent were a really buff mage and a living embodiment of nightmares. I went for the wizard, burning some of my Magic to scare the hell out of him with card tricks, gaining Hype in the process. Also, when I successfully reached a final destination for the first time, I had to leave the game sitting for about four minutes because I was doubled over with laughter at what I had stumbled upon.

In addition to the humor, though, Monster Roadtrip has a surprisingly human element to it (ironically, given, you know, monsters). After a few events, it stops at a rest stop, where you can trade resources and plan your route, but you can also chat with Scott and Polly, or pick up hitchhikers and chat with them. These chats don’t have decisions to make, they’re just nice little character-building moments where you can bond with your favorite monsters. By the way, for those of you who liked the dating aspect of the previous games, they can you still get an end date if you chase these chats long enough. And even if you don’t, chatting with your fellow roadtrippers activates wacky passive effects and can occasionally trigger special events.

Related: Is Monster Roadtrip A Dating Simulator?

Going back briefly to the topic of transparency, Monster Roadtrip is also a very accessible game. If the dialogue is too raunchy for you and may become very obscene, you can set trigger warnings in the game options to filter out the things you’re uncomfortable with. As in previous games, you can set your player character’s name and preferred pronouns, and there are also difficulty settings for calmer or more intense runs. Best of all, you can now save halfway! Since a race continues indefinitely until you die or reach a destination, a save feature was an absolute must, so I’m really glad they remembered to put that in.

Destroying friendships for fun and profit

On subsequent runs I’ve added a few extra players and switched to one of the other game modes. At the end of a single or multiplayer race, each player is scored based on their resource contribution to the destination you finished at, with the winner receiving a special unique final CG. However, if you want to keep things low-pressure, you can switch to Friend Hugger mode so there are no winners and no losers. However, you can’t get the unique CGs if you play that way.

If you really want to backstab your friends, you can play Prank Masterz mode, unlocked after the first successful run. In this mode, each player is given special challenge cards at the start of the race and at rest stops, which require you to complete various tasks or meet certain objectives. By completing these challenges, players earn Prank Dollarz (with a Z, as Scott always reminds us), which they can bid to forcefully kick other players out of certain activities at a rest stop.

I think if I had to criticize Monster Roadtrip’s flaws, there would be two. First, some of the election results are a bit obtuse. The game does a decent job of explaining what kinds of actions affect which resources, but at times, the options feel like a complete dice game. Granted, it is less of a crapshoot than previous games, which is nice, but it can still be frustrating to lose your progress over a confusing choice. Second, the game is missing a few features at launch, namely its CG gallery and achievements. These will be added later though, so it’s a relatively minor concern.

Riding into the sunset

Monster Roadtrip is a great game for when you just want something fun to pass the time while listening to a podcast, or when you want something fun to do with friends that doesn’t require a lot of setup. The game is supported both online and locally, so even if your friends don’t have the game, you can host a session yourself, board game night style, by simply streaming through Discord or something.

If I had to choose between a real-life roadtrip, complete with stops at a sketchy, smelly Stucky’s, and a Monster Roadtrip with a stop at a magical, mischief-inducing Stucky’s, I’d definitely choose the latter every time.

Monster Prom 3: Monster Roadtrip is available for PC via Vapor Y G.O.G..