• Price: $14.99 USD (currently on sale for $13.49 until March 9th)
• Developer/ Publisher: Odencat
• Release Date: March 2, 2023

A review code was kindly provided by PR Hound on behalf of Odencat. We thank them for being able to cover something they’ve worked so hard on.

We reviewed Odencat’s Fishing Paradiso last year, a colorful game where you catch fish and make friends in the afterlife. When they announced Meg’s Monster, I was instantly intrigued by the concept. You play as Roy, a borderline invincible ogre who runs into a stray human child (Meg) in the Underworld. One would think that the story would end just there, considering that most residents of the Underworld like to eat humans. Instead, Roy must not only keep Meg alive, but also prevent her from crying. (“Child’s Ogre: Let Us Cry Together”?)

The game starts with Meg waking up all alone in the Underworld; humans sometimes end up down there. She encounters an ogre named Roy and his best friend Golan, and asks where her mommy is. They don’t know (or care, probably), but Golan wants her as a snack. Afraid, she begins to cry, and everything turns red.

They figure out that she must be causing this phenomenon, and Golan convinces her that he was joking about eating her. Meg stops crying, and so does that world-ending feeling. They start calling her a Harbinger of Ruin, saying that her tears will “call forth the end of the world.” Normally I wouldn’t say that bottling up your emotions is a good thing, but uh, in this case I think we can make an exception.

Once Meg stops crying, another ogre comes along because he could smell her and wants to eat her. Roy chooses to fight that ogre because he thinks he wants his “Magic Tar,” not realizing he wants the human. The good news is that Roy has 99,999 HP and has really high defenses. (Golan doesn’t participate in battles.) Due to Roy’s already amazing capabilities, you won’t have to grind at all.

There are a limited number of plot-related battles and there are no random encounters. Sometimes there are mini game mechanics in and out of battle that require you to dodge or something, but I found the fights to be pretty easy; they mostly seem to be there for the sake of providing an environment that’s more likely to make Meg cry. While Roy protects Meg from any physical damage, seeing Roy get hurt results in emotional harm. Once her happiness meter hits zero, she cries and it’s game over. After each battle, Roy and Meg receive different kinds of stat increases, and Roy may learn a skill. If you lose, you can just retry the battle.

Once you defeat the ogre that tried to take Meg, Golan figures that they’ll have to take her home with them since her mom is nowhere to be found. He desperately wants to placate her to prevent her from crying again: “For now, let’s just do as she asks, and try our best not to set her off!” He suggests giving Meg toys to keep her happy and calm, because he’s heard they use them as distractions in the human world. They go to the salvage yard for that, “where stuff from the human world comes tumbling down for whoever finds it first.” When Meg’s happiness meter gets low in battle, use the Toys command to restore it.

Toys are one use each per battle, restore varying amounts of Meg’s “HP,” and may have additional effects like increasing Roy’s attack or Meg’s defense. Roy, Golan, and Meg go out and search for her mother every day, and each day is pretty short, even with some optional events labeled in green. When they return home for the day, Meg asks Roy to play with her. You can choose which toy you’d like to play with, and I always chose the toy that we hadn’t used in battle yet, which meant it got added to my inventory.

The playtime scenes are adorable; I loved the scene where Roy makes up his own card game because he doesn’t know any. Before advancing too far in the game, I was actually expecting that we’d have to go and search for new toys, but they limited the options to five. (Meg also complained that Roy’s home doesn’t have any decor; I had also hoped that we could get a bunch of decorations for it like we could in Fishing Paradiso.)

When the trio does go out of the house, there are only a few places for them to go. There’s a salvage yard, an important character’s house, a monster village, and a few other areas. The High Underworld Council, which checks on any human that lives in the Underworld, convenes in the monster village. They add some comic relief in a story with some heartbreaking moments. The group of four is not what I would expect from a council of monsters; they all have some quirks but they aren’t evil. When they hear that Roy is living with a human, they intend to conduct an investigation, but they’re easily distracted. I found myself laughing during a lot of their scenes. And I really liked their character designs!

Meg’s Monster is an emotional roller coaster where you may laugh and cry, and I did not predict many of its twists and turns. When I considered the title of the game, I had wondered if Roy was that monster, or if it was going to be more of a metaphor for the sadness and fear that makes Meg cry. Many of my guesses were wrong, and I’m glad. The emotional impact of the characters and their story wouldn’t have been the same if they hadn’t made the choices they did.

This is a touching story of found family and friendship. I do not cry very often – not because there’s anything wrong with it, but it can be difficult for me to feel enough of a connection with characters to cry for them. It’s even harder to develop that connection with a story on the shorter side like this. I did admittedly want more time in the Underworld getting to know the characters better, and I wanted more opportunities to come up with strategies to fight enemies while keeping Meg from crying. But they did such a good job overall that I actually got chills and teared up experiencing Meg and Roy’s story. Add a lovely soundtrack to the mix – including a beautifully haunting theme song by Laura Shigihara (below) – and it’s a recipe for a good cry. One that won’t cause the world to end. 😉

8.5/10