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 640×480
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