I'm Making a Monster

Introduction

I'm Making a Monster puts the player in the shoes of a mage-scientist stitching a monster together piece by piece while grieving a loss they can't quite name out loud. Friends keep showing up, gently and then less gently, to pull the protagonist away from the workbench and back into the world. Developed and published solo by zorkie studios, it released 5 July 2026 to a "Mostly Positive" reception: 36 of 51 launch reviews recommend it, every one of which this review reads in full. That's a solid but not overwhelming score, and reading the sample closely shows exactly why — a small, art-forward visual novel that lands hard emotionally for a lot of players while frustrating an unusually vocal minority on length and nuance.

Grief rendered in watercolour

Almost without exception, the sample agrees on the game's presentation. "The art is very very pretty and at times evocative," reads one of the more critical reviews, and even reviewers who go on to list serious complaints rarely have a bad word for the visuals or score. Several describe crying during specific scenes: "I love it! I cried," reads one; another calls it "a truly beautiful exploration of grief," praising how the decisions feel meaningful to the narrative even within a short runtime. One reviewer specifically credits the free standalone prologue with adding context worth experiencing first, calling it "essentially free DLC" for how much depth it lends the full release. The character-creation options draw their own specific praise, with multiple reviewers calling out the game's roster of up to nine selectable pronouns, including neopronouns, as a thoughtful touch that's rarer than it should be in the genre.

A story that ends before it opens up

The sample's dominant complaint isn't about tone or execution so much as scale. "I got all achievements and did 3 runs within 30 minutes," reads one review, a claim echoed almost verbatim by several others reporting completion times between fifteen and sixty minutes including every ending. A cluster of reviewers frame this specifically as a value problem rather than a quality one: "the art is not complex enough to warrant the rest of the price," reads one, and another puts it more bluntly — "this is such a binary choice game... the game reacts as if these choices are all or nothing, not a ton of nuance." Multiple reviewers say they wanted the actual monster of the title to matter more: one notes the creature is never shown in its entirety, appearing only in fragments like an eye or a hand, which several found at odds with a game named directly after it.

Nuance, or the lack of it, as a real critical fault line

A smaller but pointed thread in the negative sample goes further than complaining about length, arguing the game's central metaphor doesn't hold up under scrutiny. One reviewer, writing from experience with autism and introversion, argues the game "undermines the existence of people like me" by treating any preference for solitude as a symptom of despair rather than a valid way some people process loss, adding "you can be open to the world without being a social butterfly." A separate review makes a similar point in gentler terms, saying the story's morality feels "manichean" — you either constantly socialise or fall into complete isolation, with no depicted middle ground. These aren't complaints about bugs or pacing; they're a genuine disagreement with what the game is trying to say, and worth taking as seriously as the length complaints given how specifically several reviewers articulate it.

What the achievement data shows

I'm Making a Monster tracks six achievements, and the spread lines up closely with what the review sample describes: a short game with a handful of branching endings rather than a long content tail. Meeting a key friend character sits at 89.5%, and completing a monster run sits at 85.2% — both consistent with reviewers' reports that finishing the game at all takes well under an hour. From there, the numbers split roughly along the story's two major paths: one ending-related achievement sits at 70.8%, a therapy-route achievement at 64.3%, and the two least-common outcomes — abandoning the monster and a specific worst-ending achievement — sit at 41.6% and 39.2%. That's a shape typical of a short branching narrative where nearly everyone reaches at least one ending and a meaningful minority goes back to see the others, rather than a game with hidden long-tail content most players never touch.

Value

At NZ$12.48 with no DLC beyond an optional soundtrack, wallpaper pack and sheet music, I'm Making a Monster asks a price that a large share of its own reviewers say doesn't match a runtime commonly reported at well under an hour for a full playthrough plus every ending. "At $3-5 I would absolutely say give this game a try," reads one representative review, "but even getting it on sale for about [more]... I don't think it's quite worth it." That's a fair characterisation of the sample as a whole: the quality of what's here isn't in serious dispute, but its price is calibrated for a longer experience than most players actually get.

Final Verdict

I'm Making a Monster is a sincere, beautifully rendered short story about grief, friendship, and the temptation to disappear into a single obsessive project rather than face loss directly. Its watercolour art, score, and inclusive character options earn real, consistent praise across almost the entire review sample. Where it struggles is scale and nuance: a runtime measured in minutes rather than hours, a binary moral framing that a meaningful slice of reviewers find genuinely dismissive of quieter ways to grieve, and a title creature that never gets the screen time its name promises. For players who want a brief, emotionally honest visual novel and are comfortable pricing that experience on its own terms, it delivers; for anyone counting cost per hour, it's a harder sell.