Prime Monster review for PC

I haven’t written a lot in recent months around here for a few reasons. First and foremost, my job – which is related to politics, a fact that is relevant to this review – has been insanely busy, and I’ve barely had any to game, let alone write about games. On top of that, when I have had time for gaming, I’ve been absolutely obsessed with Slay the Spire II, and every bit of extra time I’ve had has invariably gotten sucked up by that.

Which is why I was so intrigued by Prime Monster. It’s a roguelike deckbuilder that’s kind of about politics – basically, my two biggest obsessions, rolled into one package. How could it miss?

By being completely lacking in fun, as it turns out. While Prime Monster has some good points in its favour (which I’ll get to shortly), it forgot to be remotely interesting or enjoyable.

The unfortunate thing is, it’s built around a really fun idea. As you can probably guess from the game’s name, you’re playing as a literal monster in a world where monsters have replaced humans, but opted to maintain a Westminster-style parliamentary democracy. Your goal is to become the leader of the governing party, otherwise known as the Prime Minister (in case you somehow hadn’t caught the pun). Along the way you have to vote on bills, keep your unruly monster caucus in line, and make decisions that will win you votes and keep your party’s coffers full.

Again, as someone whose job is tangentially related to politics, all of that deeply appeals to me. And I really like how the game has made an effort to throw in all kinds of jokes about politics, even if they’re mainly puns.

But the problem, again, is that the execution isn’t remotely enjoyable. You’re stuck with a small deck of cards and basically the same series of events every run, which means that if you’ve played Prime Monster a handful of times, you’ve seen pretty much all the game has to offer. Compare that to a really good roguelike deckbuilder, where the different permutations between runs can feel almost infinite, and you can see why the game feels so limited.

The other issue is that Prime Monster is almost impossibly hard. You start from a position of weakness in opposition, and the game does very little to allow you to get in a position to succeed. Every battle over every bill is basically a war of attrition, where you just hope you can take out enough opposition MPs (that’d be Monsters of Parliament, of course) before the opposition takes out all your MPs. It’s very easy to find yourself in a no-win situation, and then once you’re in it there’s no real way of out of it, forcing you to grind all the way to the end with no hope of victory and nothing to be gained for the next run, especially because the pool of cards is so small.

I’d really like to love Prime Monster, because it ticks off so many boxes for me in terms of my personal interests. And it shows signs of being an inventive game. But showing signs of being interesting doesn’t mean actually interesting, and it’s hard to see how this game bridges that substantial gap without some pretty major changes.

Cavalier Game Studios provided us with a Prime Monster code for review purposes.