Tri City Monsters Review – A Stylish, Accessible Dark Romance For New And Seasoned Genre Fans

Tri City Monsters is a game about finding love, acceptance, and growth in a dark world.

Immediately, Tri City Monsters show you that everyone is welcome here. Character creation involves choosing your name, your pronouns, and your genitals (penis, vagina, or ambiguous). The gender you choose does not impact any of the choices or story beats, just how your character is referred to in certain instances. I also noticed a lot of the language is already not gendered, which is nice. Your choice in genitals dictates how your arousal and certain sexual acts are described, but none of the art features your character anyway.

I think this is the correct choice, as it keeps focus on the love interests while letting you choose to headcanon your character any way you’d like. You can change your name, pronouns, and genitals at any time. So if something doesn’t feel right, or you just want to try something else out, you can rewind a few text boxes and go for a test drive immediately. My only complaint is that this is recorded at the system save level, not in individual runs. So if you wanted to roleplay as different characters, you can’t really switch back and forth between runs without manually updating the options each time.

The jazzy main theme and title screen art carousel set the mood beautifully. The game introduces you to a world somewhat reminiscent of Vampire: The Masquerade. Monsters are real, power struggles are organized around control of demon contracts, and it’s probably better if regular people don’t know about it all. Your player character is one of those regular people, thrust by circumstance into this dangerous underworld.

The meat of the game is choosing one of the three routes to explore, so TCM gets you there quickly. You investigate a sound outside your apartment and are confronted by an Enforcer, a low-level demonic entity that enforces the rules of demon contracts. With that encounter comes the most meaningful choice in the game – will you be saved by Mori, Amir, or Akello?

Amir is a high-end socialite escort, estranged from his powerful and ruthless family. His demon form is a succubus who feeds on emotional energy, the manifestation of which is a bit like a pink cloud of energy surrounded by a bug-like carapace. He smartly reconciles his human and demon roles by feeding off the feelings of lust that he himself inspires in his clients. His story is one of loss, revenge, and learning to open up after a tragedy. His powers allow him to control and influence people, so a lot of this route centers around learning to mutually trust each other.

Akello is a career academic whose life is upended in a fatal car crash, which he escapes by taking a demon contract. His monster form is a green slime with incredible power. He can reconstitute himself, heal and repair things at a cellular level, and can move with stupendous speed and strength. His route deals with facing and acknowledging our own inadequacies, having hard conversations, and learning to move past rage. He also has my favorite musical theme.

Mori is a drummer and party boy punk who relishes the chaos of a basement show. He also enjoys overindulging in alcohol and it gets him in trouble a lot. His demon form is a bakeneko, a bit like a werecat, that dials his impulsiveness up to 11. His story deals with learning to accept himself, manage familial expectations (though in a much different way than Amir), and control his self-destructive impulses.

Your main antagonist in every route is Raath, a demonic mercenary with incredible power and bloodlust. It’s fun to see how he interacts with the different characters. Sometimes conniving, sometimes explosive – he approaches the three very differently based on how much he values and respects their power (or doesn’t). If you play every route, you end up learning a lot about him. If you’re a specific kind of pervert, he is just as hot as the main love interests.

I don’t want to get into too much detail on the specific stories, but I will say that I enjoyed all of them overall. I did find that it was hard to track the passage of time in all three. It can be unclear if a day or a month passes between many of the chapters. There are places in the narratives where it will feel like your main character and your chosen beau are more attached than they should be. Tonally, I think each love interest begins the game wrestling with at least one element of classic toxic masculinity.

It feels very rewarding to support them on a journey of growth and improvement that mostly feels earned. It’s also collaborative – they understand their failings, want to get better, and slowly open up to let your character help them. It feels right.

Each final chapter was nice and long. I thought they were great capstones that tied back into the specific skills and strengths of the character you’re following in that route, as each one overcomes Raath in a totally different way. The writer and main developer, Cloud, says they didn’t write either the human or monster endings with the idea that one would be the “good” ending and one would be the “bad.”

They do mostly differ in tone – human endings tend towards the characters repairing the problems of their past, while the demon endings tend towards them accepting themselves as something outside of humanity and forging a totally new path. Mostly I preferred the human endings. Akello’s monster ending I found to be particularly sad, though Mori’s monster ending is maybe slightly better than his human one. It’s definitely nice that we get to choose between the two.

As you play through the game, your choices will give either +1 human or +1 monster. When entering a character’s epilogue, you’ll be served one of their endings based on your point total. Just loading into the last chapter using chapter select doesn’t seem to give you the chance to get enough points for the monster ending, so you do need to restart from the beginning. The routes are about 4-5 hours each if you take them slowly, but with full text skip you can blast through in about three or four minutes to see the second ending. It’s a nice option to have, though I suspect some players will want to play them in full.

AI Disclosure

Per the game’s Steam page – Tri City Monsters does not use any AI tools.

You could reasonably roleplay your character as demisexual in Amir and Akello’s routes, but not fully aromantic in any route. Many achievements are based on getting all the art, which is predicated on having sex with the characters at certain points. So there are some limits in terms of what you can do and how the game rewards them for you. On the other hand – I don’t think there will be many players who are upset that the monster sex game encourages them to have sex with the monsters. I’ve seen some discussion from players who identify as ace and/or aro, and they seem to have enjoyed these aspects of the game even anyway.

The sex scenes themselves can be pretty creative, especially in the monster forms. In one, Akello turns his perineum into slime so you can finger him. Amir’s route explores mind play and Mori has his own little surprise. I don’t want to give too many specifics, because the discovery of what they had in store was part of the fun. I will say the game often gives you a choice between penetrating or being penetrated, regardless of if you are a character that presents with a penis or not. It’s a nice touch that even in a game with three male love interests, not all the sex scenes are phallocentric.

In games where romance is a side element, like say Baldur’s Gate 3, it sometimes frustrates me when the characters are “You Sexual.” But in this game it works. It keeps the sex as a main attraction while letting you be whatever type of character you feel comfortable playing. For a game where all you can do is pick one of two text options at specific points, you have a surprising amount of player choice.

The soundtrack is really great as well. The official soundtrack for sale is only 4 tracks long, but there are about ten times that many tracks in the game. They set the mood well and there’s one track in particular in Mori’s route that is a really fun surprise.

Accessibility

Tri City Monsters features multiple text options. Dyslexia friendly fonts can be selected, kinetic text can be turned off, and text contrast, size, and spacing can all be adjusted.

You can rewind text or view recent text in a history as needed.

There are also built-in screen reading options.

Verdict – Tri City Monsters

Tri City Monsters’ creative monster designs and sex writing will appeal to experienced genre fans, while the relatively straightforward pathing makes it an easy pickup for new players. The writing can be a little uneven at times, but overall the setting is interesting and the stories are compelling. The world is realistic, but not overly oppressive.

Figures in power can’t necessarily be trusted, corruption has its fingers everywhere, and not enough library materials have been digitized. But you also get to explore locations that are sometimes surprisingly beautiful while contemplating creative expression, healing, redemption, and so on. Sure, there are a lot of sex scenes. But most of them are actually optional. The game is really one about love and what it can do for us.

Reviewed for Steam. Also available via itch.io.

8.0 Great

Developer: Studio Peaches

Publisher: Studio Peaches

Pros

- Excellent soundtrack
- Background visuals and effects are surprisingly dynamic
- Unconventional monster designs and creative sex scenes
- Ability to choose pronouns and physical characteristics independently
- A fantasy world that acknowledges real world issues in a way that feels natural

Cons

- Final chapters are less polished
- Some character arcs are a little uneven
- Cross-save options can be a little tedious to manage

Review covers version 1.0.

• Great 8.0