There are plenty of forgettable little indie RPGs floating around on the Nintendo Switch eShop, but it would be a mistake to lump developer Odencat’s Meg’s Monster with them. In fact, despite the appearance of turn-based battles and dungeons full of monsters to fight, we’d say that Meg’s Monster isn’t an RPG at all, but a game that walks a fine line between the adventure and visual novel genres. with light puzzles sprinkled in. It also has humor and heart in equal measure, making it the perfect little game to dedicate a weekend to.
Meg’s Monster begins with the titular Meg waking up on a junk pile in the underground. Soon he meets two monsters, Golan and Roy. Golan is very happy that the child-sized snack waltzed with them. Roy, on the other hand, only has eyes for the oily substance known as magic tar. However, as Golan goes to eat Meg, they soon discover that her screams are causing the apocalypse. Golan convinces the reluctant and nearly indestructible Roy to look after her while they try to find her mother by smuggling her out of the underground.
You might think that this setup—a brutal, emotionless monster protecting a young child—would hit some predictable story beats. Of course, the core of the narrative sees Meg grow up with Roy and vice versa, but without spoiling anything, Meg’s monster has a few twists in the story that kept us intrigued right up to the checkout credits. A cast of other unusual monsters, including the giddy and ineffectual, humanity-hating Monster Council, go a long way in shaping the six-hour adventure; very quickly we became attached to most of the cast and their backstories. Roy and Golan also have a nice little romance, bright with lots of “brothers” and “men” tossing back and forth as they struggle to express their emotions. Despite the one-note antagonist, the interplay between all these characters makes the story worthwhile until the end.
Most of your time protecting Meg will be spent jumping from place to place on the world map. When you reach your destination, you’ll have to talk to a bizarre creature here or beat up a monster hungry for human children there. Battles are turn-based: Roy is nearly indestructible with 99,999 health. However, Meg, who is hiding behind him, is not. If her ‘heart’ takes too much damage, she’ll start roaring and it’s game over. This creates a sort of resource management puzzle, balancing punching – Roy has three levels of punches that charge up – and using various toys to heal Meg’s spirit.
All battles are scripted, meaning there are no random monsters to fight. They often feel overwhelming at first. Meg takes too much damage, or Roy’s later opponents hit him with multiple high-damage hits, but during almost every encounter something will happen—an enemy will make a stupid mistake and drop something that Roy can use, for example—to get the blue monster bro back into it.
In the last hour or two, we stopped enjoying the fights, because they take up a lot of time with spongy flesh enemies. While Odencat threw in a few curveballs in the way of simple quick events (like the Simon Says minigame to disable an enemy device) to keep things from getting too stale, we really just wanted to see what happened to the characters we’d grown attached to in in such a short time, and the flood of arguments that led to the climax made us more and more impatient.
There are also a handful of short side missions that don’t provide any real gameplay, but instead outline the backstories of the Council members in funny little skits. Likewise, when Roy takes Meg back to his shabby mankapa to rest between story beats, the little girl convinces her monster patron to play with him. These cutscenes unlock toys to use in battle, but more importantly, they provide hilariously touching cutscenes. In one, Roy, after picking up a deck of standard playing cards, assembles the entire complex Yu-Gi-Oh– as a game with her because he never played something as simple as concentration – attacking her four of diamonds with his six of hearts, and so on.
These scenes and all of the cast’s memories come back into play together in a climactic final battle and a wonderfully moving ending. With the game’s evocative theme popping up at just the right moment, we felt like Roy punched us in the gut more with feelings than his massive fist. We even got a little misty-eyed at the end, and we’re not ashamed to admit it, bro.
Conclusion
Meg’s Monster is a unique adventure with a lot of heart, worth part of your weekend or playing for an hour or two before bed. Sure, some of it is predictable and the novelty of protecting Meg during the battle wears off towards the end, but if you’re anything like us, you won’t want to give it up until you see how Roy’s heartwarming adventure to reunite Meg with her mother ends. You might even shed a tear or two while babysitting a little girl.
