The Haunted Hoard: Monster High: Skulltimate Secrets (PS5)
The Monster High line of dolls mixes fashion with fearsome. Tapping into a similar appeal to goth and emo fashions, the toy line found a receptive audience with characters like the vampiress Draculaura and the werewolf Clawdeen, but as fun as it is to get dolls with prescribed personalities, the monster high school setting is also a perfect place for imagining which monster you would want to be in their world. Along comes Monster High: Skulltimate Secrets, a video game named for a specific toy line from the third generation of the series. However, the game focuses not on that doll’s gimmick of solving a little puzzle to see which outfit and accessories your character came with but instead making a monster of your own.
In this 3D platformer, you are a new student as Monster High, the player able to create a character in one of the seven monster types that attend the secret supernatural school. Since the characters are often meant to look nice and friendly, the degree to which they’ll look like a creature can range a fair bit and some of that is even put into your hands, a player able to determine how many Gorgon or Sea Monster traits their girl can exhibit for example. A Werewolf or Werecat doesn’t need to divert from expectations much to mix appeal with horror inspiration and the Vampire can’t exactly be faulted for not adding much to your design, but Mummy is remarkably reserved in sometimes only having a bandage wrap around the leg and Simulacrum being made of many different body parts feels like it could be pushed a touch further to match its Frankenstein inspiration. There are some nice monster specific touches like the way the Gorgons style their snake hair or the range of options for the were-pair’s fur, but whatever ghoulish girl you end up making will not be voiced or have their monstrous nature matter too much save for fashion choices that will be unlocked frequently over the adventure.
When you start your first day at Monster High, it also happens to be during a moment of supernatural mayhem. The school is experiencing many small and strange circumstances like objects moving on their own, and while this chaos doesn’t actually look that crazy when you’re wandering around, the secrets of the school hold the key to calming things down so things can return to their desired level of spooky and strange. As you step through the front gate though you immediately meet some of the famous girls from the Monster High toy line, Draculaura, Clawdeen, and Frankie Stein inviting you to join their Boo Crew in investigating hidden spots of power around the campus to clear away the rampant energy.
The characters you speak with do have voiced dialogue and Monster High: Skulltimate Secrets’s plain plot is enhanced a bit by how often spooky puns are thrown into the mix. You get “hexts” from your “beasties”, undead characters say you scared them “half to life”, and the game never being shy about throwing around such jokey word swaps makes them a delightful touch that fits its friendly monster vibe. However, there are points in conversations where you’re given an option on what you want to say back, but the game puts in almost no effort to make it seem like the person you’re talking with is responding to your specific dialogue choice. They’re not even diverse enough to make it feel like you’re building your own personality for a character, this route for making your own monster unfortunately not as fleshed out as the fashion.
Monster High: Skulltimate Secrets is a 3D platformer most of all though, and it’s a fairly relaxed and straightforward one. Exploring around the school allows you to collect Monster Point coins to spend at a clothing shop and there are specific collectibles important to opening up specific schoolrooms. Your three friends in the Boo Crew all need a certain amount of items to be able to open their associated doors, but most of the required content doesn’t require their help as you instead need to find the secret doors that send you to jumbled floating platforming challenges. These are, primarily, jumping challenges, with most of them featuring one unique complication they focus in on. This can be disappearing platforms, spinning ones, and ones that try to push you off solid ground, but they never get too advanced despite sometimes having tight windows that might test a younger player’s reaction times a bit. Early on though you get two skills, a midair jump and a dash, that make platforming much easier and more engaging. The double jump and dash seem like they’d almost be the start of a fairly involved movement system, but when you start unlocking the remaining four abilities, you learn they’re just visually different versions of the same moves.
However, those two techniques do open up the platforming segments a fair bit if you get creative with them. You never need to use them to their full potential, but since most areas you can see are solid ground for standing on, you can sometimes pull off clever navigation using windowsills, rubble piles, and other bits of level geometry if you did want to speed through the action segments. The Monster Points encourage you to take the main path though and you mostly engage with platforming that won’t put up much of a fight, especially since a drop isn’t punished really, and the only enemy in the entire game are the Garbage Goblins. Little cycloptic trash bins with spider legs will try to swallow you whole and you can knock them over to temporarily stun them, but they usually aren’t much of a concern since they’re easy to see coming. The platforming design isn’t too ambitious and grows stale rather early, the Garbage Goblins almost feeling like a non-factor since they’re so tepid and easily avoided, but at least sometimes around the high school you can use your movement options to also find hidden goodies to get a bit more out of the sadly wasted potential of your techniques.
THE VERDICT: Monster High: Skulltimate Secrets might lightly please a fan of the series who’s been eager to make their own fashionable monster, but beyond the range of unlockable fashion options, this 3D platformer is mostly about plain item collection and stale platforming challenges. The double jump and dash actually had some range for interesting use if the game pushed a bit harder or had better gimmicks to obstruct you, but only one enemy and some fairly basic variations found in each jumping challenge makes what you’re doing rather boring and easy in a way that occasional spooky puns can’t salvage.
And so, I give Monster High: Skulltimate Secrets for PlayStation 5…
A BAD rating. Monster High: Skulltimate Secrets is a very basic sort of bad, the game not committing egregious sins and more just finding a pretty boring gameplay rut to settle in. There are side quests that often just involve more walking around grabbing things, and while there is sort of a collect-a-thon angle in trying to find all the Monster Points, treasure chests, and fashion items, the PlayStation trophies reward you before you’ve found them all which slightly undermines the effort. It really is a shame the game only elected to have two monster techniques that it rebrands three times each, the double jump and dash surprisingly solid in giving you room to explore. If the world had more often been conducive to using them creatively or pushed you to master them then this game could have been surprisingly solid, but even though it’s fairly shallow and repetitive, I can easily see a person who likes Monster High enjoying it well enough. If it’s going for fairly cheap and you like the doll line, it is a simple interactive experience where you can make your own monster, see a few of the big names from the franchise, and not find your time with it obstructed much by danger or skill checks. It makes it rather weak as a game, but it fits into that licensed game niche of being tolerable merchandise meant to appeal to a subset of people who got their quality content elsewhere and just want a little more of what they love.
One advantage Monster High: Skulltimate Secrets has as as 3D platformer is its action keeps you moving and active even when it’s failing to be creative in laying out the obstacle course before you. It’s not really slow or sloppy and Monster Point collection usually keeps you fairly busy, the game undoubtedly shallow and only really using its brand to earn your attention but it’s not rough to play. You can enjoy the little touches like the monster puns and the clothing options, but Monster High: Skulltimate Secrets stopped itself before it could design more interesting action and elected to put appealing to young players first, missing out on its chance to put together some quality play alongside those charming little touches.