Have you ever wanted to run your own hotel for adorable plush monsters? Who hasn’t, right? Now, thanks to the combined efforts of 9 Story Media Group, Little Guy Games, and The Monster Factory, you can build and run your own monster hotel in your purse, pocket, or on any Android or iOS device. Welcome to Monsters Everywhere!
You begin the game by inheriting the derelict Kingston Arms hotel and your first employee, the lovable (if dim-witted) bellhop Doyle, who guides you through the game’s systems and your efforts to restore the hotel to its forgotten grandeur. The gameplay itself is pretty standard fare for this genre. You build rooms and decorate them, then attempt to match your queue of patrons with the room of their dreams. The better the match between monster and room preference the greater the reward, which you’ll use to further improve your structure and add to the hotel amenities, such as opening the kitchen or hiring housekeeping.
What separates Monsters Everywhere! from being just another management sim are the detective mini-games. Hotel managers will uncover clues left by patrons, which can be examined and will lead players on a world geography trivia game to piece the clues together and receive exclusive rewards. True to the freemium form, players can attempt to solve puzzles on their own or spend in-game currency (which can be purchased for real-world cash) to increase their odds of making the correct selections or to speed along the hotel management process.
Perhaps the best part of the app is unattached to the game proper. Users can take Monster Selfies–which places a digital monster in the frame of your device’s camera, a feature common to many apps on the market–and upload them to Instagram using the hashtag #monsterseverywhere. Or, in a clever bit of cross-promotion, should a user own one of Monster Factory’s physical plush monsters, they can do the same, uploading and tagging photos of monsters all across the globe.
Monsters Everywhere! is not breaking any ground with its hotel management gameplay. If you like these types of games, then you’re likely to find the elements of the genre that you enjoy present here. If that’s all that the app offered, it would still be worth a trial download, but that’s about all I could say. However, by mixing in a mini-game reminiscent of Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? and the push to take and upload monster shots to social media, Monsters Everywhere! is more than what I was expecting to find and certainly worth checking out.
Monsters Everywhere! is available as a free download, with optional in-app purchases, on the iTunes Store and Google Play Store.
Save
