These Monsters: An Eerie Audiovisual Landscape

[SPOILERS (?) BELOW]

A good place to start with These Monsters would be the description on the itch.io page for the game. 

The developers, known as Strangethink, give the game the following blurb:

You are trapped in an infinite series of island museums, you can try and escape through the black doors but you are just getting yourself deeper into trouble.

All you can do is look at the faces of the monsters and learn about them through the evil television sets.

If you are lucky, you will find a bad world that crashes the game. If this happens, then you have won.

Hold left mouse button to zoom in for more intense television watching.

If you enjoy this kind of thing, then please consider making a small donation.

Pretty spooky, right? Something about the fact that crashing the game, thereby no longer playing it counts as a win state, has an aura of foreboding to it as if "the game doesn't want to be played". But These Monsters has a bit more going for it than that, in terms of it's eeriness. 

When you first boot up the game, you are greeted with a screen of static and a large, strange black blob that houses the menu:

This choice of static and black blob will make sense once the game begins and you start exploring. Speaking of which, exploring is the name of the game here in These Monsters. It is quite entirely the beginning, middle and end of the gameplay - your whole purpose is to walk around or even jump around, and look at blobby paintings and televisions resting in a primordial black ooze. But first, let's talk about how These Monsters starts.

The game opens with a hazy view of a brightly coloured and alien structure. As you walk towards it, you find a ramp. On walking up it, you find yourself in these aforementioned rooms with bizarre paintings filled with shapeless forms. And on the floor, you find these TV sets broadcasting messages that seem to allude to the titular monsters.

Occasionally, you find a black door with another amorphic multi-coloured blob that slides open into another world, quite literally - as these doors lead into dimensions that rely upon "TARDIS physics", where the world only exists by going through or looking through the door.

And...that's the gameplay. As far as I'm aware, that is all that These Monsters consists of. Wandering around aimlessly and sometimes being creeped out by images or words you might not understand. And that is where the game's mystery comes from: of not knowing what you're looking at (or what you're listening to as, to the dev's credit, the music is fittingly ambient and unusual).

I gave the game "the ol' college try" and I played it for about 20 or 30 minutes, and after a while, it became clear that there was little here to keep me engaged. Sure, for the brief time I played it, I became kinda immersed in this world, but it's not exactly a game I will come back to any time soon. It's rooms of random halls, floors, and paintings can only entertain for me so long. In many ways, These Monsters reminds me of the Neon World from the freeware Japanese game, Yume Nikki - not just in terms of how it looks, but also when it comes to it's core gameplay loop: explore, wander and eventually, maybe, you will find something. 

And for me, that sort of design can only hold my attention for so long. Bear in mind, I understand that this game isn't supposed to have some sort of deep and meaningful story or gameplay. It's purpose as an Audiovisual experience that intrigues and mystifies it fulfills just fine. Indeed, from a technical standpoint, the game can impress - particularly with those aforementioned "warp doors" that defy space and time, and seem to further drawn you into this neon-soaked world with the player perhaps being amazed at how they work - not only in the context of the game's quote-unquote "lore", but also in how the devs actually managed to "make" it. 

On the other hand, the game does suffer from technical issues: some pretty bad screen-tearing and a lack of a vsync option, as well as not having any proper keybinding - unless you count changing between "QWERTY", "AZERTY" and "NUMPAD" as such (which I don't). But these issues aren't really a deal-breaker, as the screen-tearing isn't too bad and the controls are simple enough. Rather, what makes this game not very compelling for me is that, while you may be able to enjoy it for a while, These Monsters gives little incentive for the player to keep...well, playing. After all, there's only so much randomly generated strangeness that someone can enjoy before it quickly, and inevitably, becomes dull and repetitive.