An unassuming, emotional gaming experience that subverts our expectations
Meg’s Monster is a game that wears its Undertale influence on its sleeve. I finished the game a while ago and don’t honestly know how to even really review this. On its surface, Meg’s Monster is a simple indie RPG about a monster and a child in a silly buddy cop style adventure where we, the main character and monster named Roy, are reluctantly protecting a child that can accidentally destroy everything. Meg is a little human girl that’s fallen into a trash heap in the underworld and is looking for her mother. Humans are a resource in this world, a consumable good bought and sold as food. So naturally, everybody she encounters wants to eat her. Except for Roy, who is obsessed with a black tar that is found in abundance. Roy is talked into saving the girl by his own lanky sidekick Galon.
This is the part I’m having the most problems with, as I get into explaining the combat. The combat is all event based. Scripted. No random battles or side battles. The combat aesthetically looks like Pokemon. But here Roy is basically indestructible. He has 99999 HP. We’re never going to fall in battle. The hook is that Meg gets worried when Roy gets hurt, and the tagline is “If She Cries, The World Dies” so if her Worry Meter gets to zero, it’s game over. We can counteract this, like with items that are toys to entertain her and make her happier again. This sounds cute and unique unless we really just think about it and realize that the HP on the monster is fake and all the developers really have done is rebrand HP and healing items. And because of this the combat just gets boring. Every battle has a gimmick and every battle has story beats that dictate how it’s going to go. It’s a game of resource management in battle, and it’s fine for the first couple. Over the course of the 6-7 hours we’re playing, it becomes more and more mind numbing — but maybe that’s on purpose.
However, the soundtrack is phenomenal and everything is designed and crafted with love and attention. I love ALL of the creature designs. Roy has such a great look for a main protag. I just feel like I went into this game with the wrong mindset and it tainted some of my earlier experiences with it.
With all of that being said, and how cruel I am to the combat, I love this game. This is a game all about the story, and while I may not have had all that much fun in the fights, I was invested in the story with my entire heart. I cared about the characters, I was drawn in by everybody. I NEEDED to know what came next. It was important to me. This game brought genuine tears to my eyes. I cried. Not a lot of games can say that. Did I enjoy playing the game part of the game? Not really. But even so, I think this is a game you must experience. It’s truly a delight and had I gone into it thinking of it as a visual novel instead of an RPG it would have been easier for me to get over the shortcomings of the combat. I cannot recommend Meg’s Monster enough.
This review is based on a Steam code sent to SideQuesting by the publisher. It first appeared on the April 06, 2023 episode of The SideQuest. Images and video courtesy Odencat.
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