Meg's Monster Review: A Heartfelt And Witty Venture On Nintendo Switch

The opening to "Meg's Monster" left me feeling a tad lost at first, but I caught on eventually. I knew from the description of the game that the premise is a little girl lost in the dangerous Underworld needs the help of a hulking, grumpy monster to get back to her human world safely and reunited with her mom, who was a scientist in the villainous laboratory in the human world. 

The game opens with a blond adult woman wandering through a dilapidated, abandoned lab, reminiscing about things that don't yet make sense. This is a somewhat long opening scene, and because of what little I knew about the game, I assumed this character from the start of the game was the mom. This only furthered my confusion about this abandoned place and the timeline of everything. Why were we seeing the mom right off the bat, and where exactly was the Underworld in relation to humans? Is it beneath the surface, like purgatory? Is it another dimension? Something else entirely? It turned out that the character wasn't Mom at all, but Meg in the present day.

The opening narration could have been a bit better outlined — just making the mom a brunette would have been enough to distinguish the little girl, Meg, as an adult, from her mom's character, or adding some sort of chronological indicator to help orient the player. Or just flat-out telling us would have been good, too. (The game improves at all of this later, though.) On the other hand, I know how compelling yet informative openings can be tough and for players — it's best to just go along with it and have faith that questions will eventually be answered, so I didn't let this faze me too much. 

The realm of the Underworld is so enduringly, eccentrically human. Not in a way that implies a lack of imagination or laziness from the designers in drafting a monstrous way of living and thinking. Rather, it's in a clever way that demonstrates that a set of universal truths — whether in the world of monsters or the world of humans — dictates us ... like the importance of teaching children to look both ways for cars before crossing a road. Even if the teacher is a towering, cloaked red monster and the child is the harbinger of ruin. There were a lot of instances like that — Roy being stuck playing horsey was another that stuck out — and they were all insanely cute. 

Other human touches are more humorous than they are heartfelt, a cheekiness from Odencat that didn't go unnoticed — like the fact that some monsters have the first names of middle-aged accountants, like Roy and Jason, while others have more fittingly ghoulish names like Golan and Creeper. Along the way, there are many amusing instances where our gruff protagonist encounters unfamiliar tokens from the human world, and the use of written dialogue to show the wonder and curiosity in the unknown world is delightfully adorable — like "foe-toe" and "dee-vee-dee."

In terms of difficulty, the combat on "Meg's Monster" was not. The toughest part was what's true of any turn-based fighting: Laying out your moves in a way that's offensive but prepares you for the unexpected. There are no surprise battles, nor can you opt out of any. Most combat scenes were clearly orchestrated to progress in certain ways — with Golan dashing in to make Meg laugh and raise her emotional health bar, enemies unexpectedly falling asleep so you can attack them — which I think you could either love or hate depending on how hard you wanted the game to be.

It's in the "Meg's Monster" fight scenes that the true JRPG signature of a game shines through — not only do you have the turn-based play, but there's also a whole lot of DBZ-reminiscent shirtlessness and shredded abdominals (even on old guys and monsters, which made me laugh) and villains that say, verbatim, "mueh-heh-heh-heh." They might as well have been rubbing their hands together evilly or petting a cat — evilly — in each scene, too. It was goofy, but in an endearing way.

What absolutely stood out to me the most about the fighting in "Meg's Monster" was a scene in which Golan and Meg are trying to sway Roy from making a decision, and in doing so, each initiate a battle against him. Odencat uses this as an opportunity to switch our controls suddenly from Roy to first Golan and then Meg. What ensues isn't a fight, though — with Roy's insane HP now turned against you and instead being in the bodies of two much weaker characters, your strategy suddenly becomes using pleas, reasoning, flashbacks, and hits (that are probably desperate swats, more like, since they only do 1 damage to Roy) in an attempt to prevent him from doing something. It was a simple addition, but I found it to be very creative and profound.

You reach a false end of sorts during the game, and that resolution will devastate you — in such a short time, I had gotten so attached to this little trio that the tragedy of that ending brought tears to my eyes. If you play "Meg's Monster" and find yourself feeling a bit cheated with that ending when the story is (seemingly) over and the credits appear to have started rolling, just hang on. The game finds its stride and surges forward into an unexpected new chapter, where we take on a more omnipresent stance and get unexpected insight into the motives of many other characters.

One disclaimer is that at this point right before that new chapter, Meg is tasked with making a major choice. I don't know if the decision I made impacted the direction the rest of the game went — the other choice could have ended the game right then and there, for all I know. 

Once I finally reached the actual end of "Meg's Monster," I was infinitely more approving of the true resolution — it brought a silver lining of hope for the fate of these fictional creatures that softened the sadness remaining even in Roy and Meg's final chapter. As Roy grows begrudgingly fond of Meg and his stony countenance melts, I was reminded of the warm and fuzzies bestowed by a certain beloved childhood Pixar movie that also follows a lost young girl, a big ole grump of a monster, and his more sociable best friend — "Meg's Monster," like that movie, was discreetly-packaged wholesomeness and tribute to human nature under the guise of colorful pixelated monsters.

A lot of the major revelations in "Meg's Monster" have to do with humans mistreating each other and the environment around them — so it's easy to glean that some deeper themes are at play. When the game's plot reached its peak, we were shown both how kind and selfless those we perceive as monsters can be, and what ugliness humans are capable of. It felt clear that this was what Odencat meant to do — to invoke emotion, tug at heartstrings, and leave you staring at the credits with hope and hopelessness dueling inside the mind.

Yes. Yes, I think you should pay the asking price, (less than $20) to play "Meg's Monster" next time you have a long, uninterrupted weekend afternoon to fill. The quirks about the mechanics that I didn't care for aside, this is the most impactful that a game has been on me in a long time. Odencat is owed major props for being able to pull us through such a broad spectrum of emotions — anger, curiosity, amusement, sadness, and joy — in such a short length of time. 

Had I purchased "Meg's Monster" for myself, it probably would still have been a one-and-done play-through for me — except maybe to seek an answer to that plot hole — but even a game without much repeat-play value can still be a really fantastic game. Even if JRPGs aren't your thing, even if you never could get into turn-based fighting — don't look at "Meg's Monster" in that way. Look at it as a game with a story to tell, with you being the perfect audience — especially if you've never learned that it's okay to be vulnerable.