Monster Prom is a comedy narrative game in which you, a newly transferred monster to Spooky High, need a date for the Monster Prom. The game is a hilarious experience full of unique gags each and every time you play through it. One thing Monster Prom does exceptionally well is it establishes its characters and makes them feel real. The characters are not just a vessel to continue the story, but by the end of the game you as the player will have formed real deep connections with them that will have you yearning to play again and again.
How Monster Prom Effectively Uses Tropes
Monster Prom has six main protagonists that are options to be your date to the upcoming dance. These six characters utilize tropes from typical love and school books and movies to create characters that are easy to understand and get attached to at first. The game features a jock, hipster, bully, party girl, preppy girl, and business tycoon. Players will likely already be well familiar with these character tropes and should easily be able to quickly understand each of these characters and form early opinions and attachments. Using these common tropes opens the door for the player to be given direction without the need of a tutorial based solely on past interactions.
Digging a Little Deeper
While Beautiful Glitch opens the door by showing the player their characters through classic well known tropes, playing the game reveals something so much deeper. By finishing the game a few times and finding some of the secret endings they are able to find a more personal connection to these characters that are not seen on a surface level glance. The party girl ghost character who is always skipping school to drink and get up to wacky antics actually hides a sad story behind how she became a ghost. The werewolf jock who is always blindly and loyally following his friends does so because he never got to know his own parents, and is raised by the members of the school football team.
Wrapping it All Together
Monster Prom takes advantage of what the player knows and doesn’t know to effectively tell its story. Using tropes the player is already familiar with allows them to get their foot in the door much more easily and become hooked on the game. This leads perfectly into expanding the horizons of the story and revealing some real hard-hitting content. Tropes are used to ease players into discovering more about the characters they’ve grown attached to, which creates much more shock and allows for bigger more meaningful emotional responses. Monster Prom is a masterclass in how to write characters.
