Hollywood Monsters is an older game from the Spanish developer Pendulo Studios, who are probably better known for their more recent Runaway: A Road Adventure game. It should be noted that Hollywood Monsters is not publicly avaliable in English, and as of this writing it is unclear whether it ever will be. The distributor of the Spanish version was a company Dinamic which unfortunately ceased to exist.

The game's protagonists are two young journalists, Sue Bergman and Ron Ashman. They both work for a Los Angeles newspaper called The Quill, but don't like each other much and are bitter rivals. In the intro we see the Quill editor telling Ron about a "Monsters' Ball" - a social event where all the Hollywood movie monsters have a big party at the mansion of Otto Hanover, a film producer (no relation whatsoever to the Monsters' Ball movie). The editor stresses that the Quill just has to cover the event, it is too important to miss. Ron is not very enthusiastic about going at all however. But when Sue comes in, Ron (apparently skilled in exploiting other people's personal quirks for his own purposes) starts telling the editor how important it is that the Quill send their best man and how he is the only one capable of accomplishing the task. This has the expected effect - Sue proclaims that quite obviously she is the best journalist the Quill has, that there's no way Ron could do a decent job and proceeds to the Hanover mansion in her little sports car.

That's where the game begins. You play as Sue Bergman and your job is to get into the ball room to interview the monsters and discover as many juicy tidbits that your readers so love as you can. Unfortunately getting there isn't so easy so you snoop around the mansion instead. You overhear a conversation revealing that Frankenstein wishes to urgently speak to the Invisible Man and decide that you'll go meet "Frankie" yourself. 

Next morning at the Quill, Sue is nowhere to be found. The Quill's editor is not happy about that and sends you - Ron Ashman - to investigate. You start at the Hanover mansion again and soon discover that something bad has happened to both Sue and Frankenstein - there is no sign of either of them. So now your task is to find them both and in Frankenstein's case, also bring him back to life (not so difficult in this particular instance, after all it's been done once already).

This takes the better part of the game. You get to visit a few other famous Hollywood monsters so a fair amount of travel is involved. Transylvania (guess who lives there), Australia, Egypt, Switzerland, Scotland, you get to see the world. This part of the game is highly nonlinear and you can access pretty much all locations at once - although you must learn of their existence first. There is an extensive cast of interesting and wacky NPCs to talk to, many of them Hollywood monsters. In this game, Count Dracula is the real Count Dracula, the Wolfman is a real wolfman, the Mummy is a real mummy (unwrapped though) and so on. The game is decidedly on the non-serious side.

And if you successfully solve the mystery, you will have a great story for The Quill!

The game's graphics betray the age of Hollywood Monsters - the resolution is 640x480 and the game looks nowhere near as good as Runaway, but still acceptable. The graphical style is 2D cartoon, with decent animation. All in all, not too impressive these days but adequate.

Sound quality is unfortunately less adequate. The speech seems to use low sampling rate and there is audible noise. The music sounds good however, both technically and in the choice of a decidedly "retro" style - the game seems to be set sometime in mid-20th century.

The interface is classical point and click, mouse controlled with a list of verbs to choose from and hotspots. Nothing unusual, easy to use and works well.

Puzzles are nearly all inventory based, although there is one nice puzzle where you have to assemble a picture from jumbled pieces (not a slider puzzle mind you!). The puzzle difficulty I would rate somewhere between difficult and impossible. I don't think I could have finished Hollywood Monsters without a walkthrough, or at least not in any reasonable timeframe. Some puzzles make good sense but others seem a bit too contrived and didn't make sense to me even after reading solution, plus there was often not much in the way of hints. Maybe I was not in a sufficiently non-serious frame of mind.

Here's an example of what I consider a completely nonsensical puzzle (a spoiler seems unavoidable here): near the end of the game you need to knock out a security guard (whose back is turned towards you). In your inventory you have a nice sledgehammer and a perfectly good shovel. Both in my opinion perfect instruments for knocking unsuspecting victims out. But will Ron use them? Noooo. What he does is break into a glass vitrine (wasting valuable time) with a wax statue of famous baseball player. You'd think that he'd take the baseball bat - but he actually takes the baseball and knocks the guard with that! Gimme a break. I'm sure the authors thought it was funny - and I agree that knocking people out with a baseball is fun, but not the way it was presented as a puzzle.

Anyway enough whining, just keep in mind that you have to look around the screens very, very carefully (there is some pixel hunting) and don't try to think too logically about the puzzles. Hollywood Monsters is certainly more funny than serious and that reflects on the puzzles too. On the good side, I don't recall any dying or timed sequences in the game, which is always a plus. There should be no dead ends either.

Hollywood Monsters is a fairly long game, with lots lof locations to visit and people to talk to and tons of inventory puzzles. If you like this kind of game, it should keep you occupied for several days at least.

All in all, Hollywood Monsters is not a bad game, but not at the top of my list either. Technically well done though not excellent, with an interesting and funny story. For the most part nonlinear and sporting puzzles somewhat in the style of Monkey Island games. My final word on Hollywood Monsters is a B-.

Final Grade: B-

System Requirements:

• Windows 95/98/Me
• Pentium 133 Mhz
• 32 MB RAM
• 640 MB hard drive space
• CD-ROM 4X
• 2 MB graphics memory
• Sound