Monster Prom

Most dating sims are private, quiet affairs. You sit alone at a keyboard, save before every choice, and slowly unlock a single character’s route. Beautiful Glitch looked at that formula and asked a better question: what if the romance was a race, and your friends were sitting next to you trying to steal your date?

That question is the whole of Monster Prom. Set at Spooky High, a school full of monsters, the game gives one to four players three in-game weeks to land a prom date. Each turn you pick a location, such as the gym, library, bathroom or auditorium. That choice raises one of six stats (Smarts, Boldness, Creativity, Charm, Fun and Money) and triggers a random event. These events are the heart of the game: short, strange, often dark scenarios whose outcomes depend on stat checks and on which absurd answer you are willing to pick in front of an audience.

The love interests are the draw. There is a werewolf, a vampire, a gorgon, a ghost, a demon and a merfolk heir, each written with a distinct personality, private secrets and their own special endings. On Switch the game ships as Monster Prom: XXL, which bundles the Second Term DLC (more love interests) and all the seasonal content. That bundle is the obvious buy for anyone starting fresh.

In the market, Monster Prom sits in a narrow and mostly empty space: a competitive visual novel built for parties. It borrows the look and structure of the dating sim but plays more like a party game such as Jackbox, where the stories people tell afterward matter more than winning. That is a rare niche for a text-heavy indie game with no real action, and its reputation rests almost entirely on writing — a bet that, on the evidence of the design, is a reasonable one.

• Competitive Multiplayer Romance: One to four players, on one couch or online, compete for the same pool of dates. Two friends chasing the same vampire is a feature, not an accident.
• Stat-Driven Event System: Where you go shapes your stats. Your stats decide whether an event lands, and events decide how much each love interest likes you. It is simple, readable and fast.
• Huge Content Pool: More than 1,000 possible situations, items and events, plus dozens of secret endings. Repeat runs keep turning up material you have never seen.
• Inclusive Romance Design: Romance options do not depend on your character’s gender or orientation. Every player can pursue anyone, and nobody has to fight a menu to get there.
• Short Solo Runs: A lighter single-player mode offers shorter sessions for playing alone, though it is clearly the secondary mode.
• XXL Bundle on Switch: The Second Term DLC and seasonal content come included, which makes the Nintendo version the most complete package out of the box.

The Gameplay Loop

A Monster Prom run is short by design. Three in-game weeks pass in well under an hour, and the loop is stripped almost to nothing: pick a location, gain a stat, resolve an event, repeat. Between rounds, group events put every player in the same scene, and the game asks everyone a question. Their answers push their stats up or down and change how the love interests see them.

That compression is the game’s smartest design choice. Traditional dating sims ask for dozens of hours before a payoff. Monster Prom delivers a complete romantic arc, win or lose, in about the time it takes to order a pizza. Losing costs you almost nothing, and that changes how people play. Nobody reloads a save to fix a bad answer. They pick the most outrageous option on purpose, because the fallout is funnier than winning.

Writing as the Core Mechanic

In most games, writing supports the mechanics. Here, the writing is the mechanic. Events are built around sharp, absurd and often pitch-black comedy, and the choices are written to make players laugh, groan or accuse each other of something. The monster cast does a lot of the work. Each character has a clear personality and a set of running jokes, so even a two-line reaction lands because you already know who is speaking.

That depth pays off over time. With over a thousand situations and dozens of secret endings, the content pool is deep enough that a regular group will keep finding new scenes for many sessions. The secret endings add a second layer: once you have seen the basic outcomes, the hunt for hidden ones gives experienced players a reason to keep coming back.

Where the Strategy Runs Thin

Here is where the game shows its limits. Monster Prom is light on strategy, and success often comes down to luck or to already knowing the answers. Stat checks are not shown clearly in the moment, so a first-time player is guessing which answer rewards Boldness and which rewards Charm. Veterans learn the checks through repetition. At that point the “competition” is partly a memory test, and a newcomer playing against a regular is at a real disadvantage.

For a party game this is tolerable, even a little charming, since nobody should take a monster prom too seriously. But players who expect the tactical depth that “competitive” usually suggests will find little to work with. There is no deep resource management, no long-term planning beyond “raise the stat your crush likes,” and the random events often override careful play. The game rewards commitment to the bit far more than it rewards calculation.

The Solo Problem

The biggest structural weakness is single-player. The shorter solo runs work, but they remove the thing that makes the game special: other people reacting to what you choose. A joke that brings a room to tears is just a line of text when you read it alone. Solo Monster Prom is a pleasant, funny visual novel. Group Monster Prom is an event. Few party games have a gap that wide between their two modes.

User Experience Flow

Onboarding friction is low. The rules take a minute to explain, turns move quickly, and the group-question format keeps everyone involved even when it is not their turn. That matters: the worst party games leave three people watching one person play. Monster Prom keeps every player’s attention on the shared screen, which is exactly where it should be.

The art direction is bold and cartoonish, with bright character portraits and exaggerated expressions that suit the comedy. Each love interest is instantly recognizable, which matters when four people are reading the same screen from across a living room. The characters look like a Saturday-morning cartoon, and the writing is anything but, and that contrast is a big part of the joke.

The interface is functional rather than elegant. It is mostly text boxes, portraits and stat readouts, with clean menus and a clear layout. The downside is density: in group play a lot of text appears at once, and slow readers can end up holding up the table. Better pacing controls or a clearer display of stat checks would help.

Performance is a non-issue by design. This is a 2D, text-driven game, and it is light on hardware by nature. Nothing about its presentation is technically ambitious, and nothing needs to be.

Steam: The PC version is where the community lives. Mouse control fits naturally with a menu-driven visual novel, and online multiplayer makes it easy to get a group together without sharing a couch. The downside is that the Second Term content and extras are sold separately, so a full Steam setup costs more than the base price suggests.

Nintendo Switch: The Switch is arguably the ideal platform for this game. Sold as Monster Prom: XXL, it bundles the Second Term DLC with its extra love interests and all the seasonal content, so the complete package comes in one purchase. More importantly, the hardware fits the use case. Dock it to a TV and hand out controllers, and you have exactly the local, same-room party experience the game was designed for. Small, text-heavy screens in handheld mode make solo reading less comfortable, but solo was never the point.

Monster Prom succeeds because it knows what it is. It is not a deep strategy game, and it is not a sweeping romance. It is a joke delivery system disguised as a dating sim, and it is good at that. Beautiful Glitch put its effort where it counts: the writing is funny, the cast is memorable, and the content pool is deep enough to survive months of regular game nights.

The weaknesses are real. The luck-heavy stat checks give veterans an unfair edge, and single-player drains away most of the appeal. But these are the costs of a design built for a group, not signs of a lazy one. We recommend it to groups with three friends and a free evening who want laughs over depth — and to them specifically. On Switch, the XXL edition is the clear version to buy.