Put on your old varsity jacket and dust off that fancy dress, because it’s time to go head-to-head with your classmates for the perfect date to the prom—the Monster Prom, that is.

Monster Prom is an upcoming game, created by the fledgling Barcelona-based studio Beautiful Glitch, where your only goal is to woo the monster of your dreams before the biggest night of the school year. And though this may sound like just a silly premised dating sim on the surface, Beautiful Glitch has set out to make this game a historical landmark by crafting it to be the first ever competitive local multiplayer dating sim. That’s right, LOCAL multiplayer, meaning on the couch right next to you. Your goal is to compete against your friends for dates as each of your decisions affect each other’s dating prospects and outcomes.

At MomoCon this year in Atlanta I was able to play the demo and speak to the Producer and Creative Director of Monster Prom, Julian Quijano. His indie team is a mere four people, but you would never be able to tell it from the quality of the game. Monster Prom has been in development for a little over a year now with a successful Kickstarter and some great networking on Quijano’s part. He has taken what he learned from his successful magazine, The Indie G Zine, which is an anthology dedicated to the best classic and upcoming indie games, and put it toward building Monster Prom as his first game.

The demo they showcased was a polished and well-paced snippet of the full thing. Each player starts off answering personality quiz questions to determine which of the many stylized monsters they will play as. Accompanying these choices are narration and dialogue options that provide well-written mixes of both silly and adult humor.

And not all of your options have to do with dating. To give you an example, I ended up playing as a flame-haired demon who didn’t want anything to do with school. Instead, I skipped and threw a witchy bonfire where I convinced a depressed businessman to create an app for dick pic enhancements via penis emojis, appropriately titled “HapPenis.” This increased my wealth and charm stats quite wonderfully and brought me closer to wooing this cute specter boy in the school library—that is—until one of my fellow players burned down the library in a crazy demon ritual.

My play-through against three of my friends was riddled with crass humor, which Quijano stated was essential to the game’s life force. “It’s hard to find a game that excels just at being funny,” he told us. “A game that makes you laugh out loud by its own narrative. We can all laugh with Quiplash, but it’s like cheating, because it is not because of the game’s narrative, but because of player’s participation.”

Though online play and single-player modes may come later on, Monster Prom was always meant to be enjoyed as a group. When pressed as to what drove them to create a local multiplayer game, Quijano was quick to cite that his muses were the successful indie game The Yawhg and tabletop gaming. “The experience is really different that way: a lot more social,” he said. “We always picture a group of three to four friends having some drinks and laughing together. People enjoy sharing fun.”

After a few play-throughs of The Yawhg they found that repetition was inevitable due to the story limitations—something they wanted to make sure wasn’t the case with their game. “Our main replayability comes from the fact that one run, as it is now, translates into 18-36 events depending on the number of players, but we are aiming for 300+ events.”

On top of the humor and astounding number of story variations, the heart of the game revolves around young love for their fantastic array of characters. The cast of Monster Prom feels very natural; though an impromptu make-out session between a gorgon girl and a werewolf jock for the sole purpose of upping his tongue strength game may be hilarious, at its core it’s still a classic teen romance scenario. “We wanted it to feel real,” Quijano said. “We are obviously married with the absurd, but we wanted to portray an exaggeration of nowadays youth. I love how love and sex and relationships have changed in the era of social media, emojis, dating apps, and such.”

In Monster Prom you can romance everyone from an aloof ghost girly to a hipster vampire, and every instance will have you either cringing, laughing, or fawning over the monster of your dreams. Each run-through will only take your group an estimated 45-90 minutes.

Monster Prom is aiming for a release between this October and next February on PC, Mac, and Steam with eventual ports to Playstation and Xbox.

Images: Beautiful Glitch

Alex Tisdale is a writer and illustrator who runs on coffee and pop culture. You can find him covered in ink and rambling on his website or on Twitter.