Into the Vault: Monsters, Inc. Scream Team (PlayStation)

With Monsters, Inc. being a thing again thanks to Monsters at Work on Disney Plus (which is a fun little show) I thought I’d take a look back at one of the games that was released around the same time as the original film, back when monsters still scared because they cared, and it’s a game with an original premise rather than just being loosely based on the film, Monsters, Inc. Scream Team. Though the original premise makes absolutely no sense as I will explain.

Ok so I think even if you haven’t seen the movie, you know the basic premise of Monsters, Inc., which is that monsters scare children because it’s an essential power source. So that’s just a lot of creeping up on kids in bed and scaring the hell out of them, then leaving. That’s pretty much the whole gig. Complications can arise sure, but even then the entire premise of Monsters, Inc. Scream Team just makes no goddamn sense.

In Scream Team, you basically go back to Mike and Sully’s orientation/training as scarers. They have to run through various arenas building up their scare meters and scaring fake robot children, But these fake robot children are in deserts, urban street areas, the arctic! Where do they think these kids sleep? Additionally, you have to often chase down these fake robot kids across landscapes, various platforms etc. It just makes no sense in any context with the movie you just may have just watched before playing the game.

That being said, hey a premise that doesn’t make much sense can be fine if it’s just a flimsy excuse that sets up some pretty good gameplay. Unfortunately, as you might expect from a PlayStation era game based on a kids movie, Monsters, Inc. Scream Team’s biggest accolade is that it’s just a merely mediocre collectathon as opposed to an abysmal one like many others.

You run through each level, collect a ton of different stuff, scare fake robot children when you have enough scare energy, rinse repeat. The sequences where you scare the fake robot children are extremely dull affairs you just mash the right button til a meter fills up.

For some reason, you have to race Randall, Mike and Sully’s rival from the first movie, at the end of each world. Sure, why not, at least it changes up the gameplay a little bit.

Monsters, Inc. Scream Team also suffers from the problem many PlayStation-era games did of not really figuring out a style to look good in that new era of 3D polygons. It looked pretty bad then and as you can see from screens has aged really poorly since.

It’s not that Monsters, Inc. Scream Team does anything particularly poorly, it’s just that it doesn’t do anything incredibly well either. Odds are you played dozens of perfectly ok platformers like this, but there were a lot of truly spectacular platformers in the original PlayStation era so one that was just perfunctory at best certainly isn’t going to cut it.

So ultimately Monsters, Inc. Scream Team adopts a flimsy premise that makes no sense in the context of the movie universe seemingly into an attempt to make a more interesting game than one just strictly based on the movie but comes away with middling results at best. If you are still interested hey it’s like $6 on the PSN store for PlayStation 3 and Vita and kids who loved the movies/series may find some entertainment value out of it but you are definitely also perfectly good leaving this forgettable licensed platformer in the past.

That’s all for today, probably won’t have another post this weekend but definitely will next week sometime so see ya real soon!