Three teens discover that their neighbor’s house is a living, breathing monster that eats anyone who goes near it. With none of the adults believing them, and with Halloween approaching, the trio try and find a way to stop the Monster House before it eats half the neighborhood.
Not that you would know, since the game gives you the briefest of a plot description before shoving you into the game. It just assumes that you’ve seen the film, and probably are a fan of it.
Monster House is one of the most boring games I’ve ever played. 95% of the game is walking into a small room, shooting monsters made out of furniture around the titular Monster House, and then moving into the next room. If you’re lucky, you can do the most minimal amount of exploring that the game allows you to do, you’ll find collectable clapping monkeys that will unlock concept art for the movie. If you miss any, you have to go back through the game to get the ones you didn’t find the first time.
Since the developers knew that this was aimed towards kids, every monster battle just consists of you pressing the fire button, which automatically locks onto a monster, and you shooting at it while strafing around it until it’s destroyed. There isn’t even any ammo collecting. You just hit one of the buttons over and over until your water gun pumps up until it’s full again.
I guess there are a couple of things that could be counted as a “puzzles”, but are barely puzzles. One involves you have to shoot a certain amount of targets in a carnival game to get a clowns nose to place on a giant clown’s face so you can move onto the next room. Another is pipes coming up out of the floor in certain intervals.
The game has checkpoints, but they’re so few and far between, so you’ll have to go back 15 minutes of game. While the game isn’t all that difficult, it’s definitely makes the game more tedious than it should if you you do happened to lose all of your health. There are even a couple of quicktime events that come out of nowhere, but thankfully they’re always the same every single time they happen. The only real problem I have with the quicktime events is near the end of the game, you have to press them in the order that they pop up, and if you don’t press it quick enough, you can end up replaying the same small part of the game over and over again, up to a couple of dozen of times.
Graphically, the game actually looks OK, but that’s mostly because of the movies great art style. But that’s probably the best I can say about the games graphics, because the game uses the exact same couple of rooms over and over again, leading to a lot of repetition visually. Considering that you play as all three characters, it makes it even worse.
Probably the best part of the whole game is not the game itself, but a bonus game based on a video game from the movie, a game called “Thou Art Dead”, based on a video game from the film, which one of the characters from the film plays in an arcade. It’s a homage to old NES games like Castlevania and Ghosts ‘N Goblins. It’s actually incredibly fun. The only problem is that you have to collect coins throughout the campaign, and even then the coins are limited, and if you want to keep playing, you have to replay the game to collect the coins.
There was a version of “Thou Art Dead” released on the official website as a promotion for the film, and I would just recommend that over the actual game.
I know that I should have low expectations no only going into a children’s video game, let alone a children’s video game based on a film meant for kids bothering their parents so they have something to play, but there have been so many good video games for children based on other forms of media that it’s not really an excuse.
I don’t know why you would give this to your kid over just showing them the film, especially when you need to have seen the film in the first place to get what’s going on. Plus the film is much more entertaining, much shorter, and much better than this game. I honestly have no idea why I even played this game to begin with. Maybe it’s because I liked the movie and I was curious as to what the game was like. I probably should have just watched a couple of YouTube videos to satiate my curiosity.
Cult Classic Corner - Video Games 