Monday, 17 February 2020

Monster Party

Now that I've finally finished Famicom Wars my NES 100 game challenge continues and the first game out of the 100 years war was a weird little title called Monster Party.

The game starts innocently enough, your character gets approached by a weird gargoyle dude who tells you that his world is full of demons and he wants you to go there and deal with the.  You get swooped into demon land and then have to play through 8 stages beating enemies and killing bosses until you get to the end.

All but one of the levels is your standard move to the left and kill all the enemies and throughout those levels are little doors.  Going into a little door will take you to a room that will either have a boss enemy or nothing and the goal is to find all the bosses, get the key and go to the next stage.

What makes this game so weird is that it seems almost as if it was developed by two entirely different people.  One of these people was trying to make a sort of cutesy platformer about a young boy and his gargoyle friend beating some monsters and the other guy was trying his damn hardest to make a spooky horror game complete with some really gruesome imagery.  If you've ever played a game called Eversion it has a sort of similar feel to that in places.

This is spoiler territory but the game gets really weird in its final cutscene where your gargoyle friend gives you a treasure box that, upon opening you find a princess inside.  Mail order princesses for heroes is weird in and of itself but after that she begins to melt, corrupting the area around her and causing you to melt as well and all this accompanied by some quite harrowing 8 bit imagery.

Despite the games sort of fucked up nature in places its actually really fun to play and if you get find a way to get your hands on it then I recommend it!  It's not very long but its a great way to kill a few hours.