In The Pillowfort.

Gayming time - Monster High: New Ghoul in School for the 3DS review

Categories: Monster High, DS games, Gayming 30 Jul 2025

We play licensed games, we are proud!

I got my Nintendo 2DS last year in August. Since then, I’ve been enjoying the wonders of gaming that this little console has to offer. My favourite games are by far the licensed ones based on various kids’ media. Monster High: New Ghoul in School was the first such game for the 3DS that I decided to play through.

Plot

You are the newest student arriving at Monster High. To help you settle in, Headmistress Bloodgood pairs you up with Spectra Vondergeist – the celebrity blogger of the Gory Gazzette. With her help you meet Draculaura and Lagoona Blue, two of her ghoul-friends who each invite you to join the clubs they’re a part of. Once you’ve joined the Student Council and the Feerleading team, you start to feel at home. However, as you explore the vast hallways of Monster High, you can’t help but notice that there is something ominous about some of its students.

A photograph showing the player in their bedroom (or dreadroom). There's a walk-in closet to the left, a vanity mirror, a bed with pink sheets behind the player, a pink circular rug to their right, a window with a seat at the far right end of the room with the curtains drawn, as well as to purple sofas and a vanity mirror across from the player. The window seat has various plushies and pillows on it, and the walls of the room have various posters showing some Monster High art. A photograph showing the player in the foyer of the school, just after they enter from the courtyard. To their left and right are potted hedges. The floor of the foyer mostly has blue tiles, along with some light-purple ones, and dark-purple rugs under the staircases. The left and right sides of the room are almost mirroring each other. To the sides of the player are two light-purple staircases. In the center of the room is a statue of Headmistress Bloodgood. In the center behind the statue is a door and a balcony above it with a window of her office. To either side of the balcony and door are light-purple staircases which lead two a wooden door each. The room is filled with groups of students chatting. View of the dreadroom (left) and of the entrance to the school (right)

The entire game takes place in two locations; your dreadroom (that’s Monster High for bedroom) and the titular school itself. The former acts as your home base where you can change your outfit and hairstyle, as well as where you begin and end each new day. The school is where most of the game takes place. Both are shown in the images above. Whoever designed and modeled it did an amazing job. It consists of three floors and a courtyard in the front. The first two floors are filled with classrooms, a gym, cafeteria, pool, central courtyard, library, etc. And you can enter almost any of them. Some rooms are boarded off and are just for show, but there’s maybe three of those in total. The third floor is reserved for the attic.

Exploration of the school was a joy. I love the Monster High 3D movies and the school in the game stays pretty true to the one in those. Sprinkled throughout the rooms are three kinds of collectibles which you can find laying around. Often, you have to figure out how to get to them by doing parkour. There are also skull coins which are common throughout the school (which also respawn whenever you load into the game). You use them to buy clothing and accessories for your avatar. All of these mechanisms serve to make the game that much more fun in my opinion.

As for the storyline(s) – they’re serviceable. They clearly aim to teach kids some good moral values, which is great. That being said, every one of them begins and plays out in the same way. At the start of the game you meet Spectra, then Draculaura, and then Lagoona. The latter two ask you to join their respective clubs but there’s no way of refusing them. Since they are a part of the main storyline, that’s understandable. The problem is that all of the side storylines are also carried out by joining or visiting clubs, with the exception of one minor questline. If you want to max the game out, you have to interact with every club under the Sun. Even though it may not sound like a flaw, it becomes repetitive fairly quickly because of the game’s pacing.

A photograph showing the Student Council members sitting around a few desks that are pushed together in an empty classroom. At the head of the makeshift table is the player, turned away from the camera. To their right is Abby, then Spectra. To the player's lrft is Catrine DeMew, and then Lagoona. Torelai is standing at the head of the table opposite the player. On the desk are two laptops and various books and writing utensils. A Student Council meeting

The game measures progress in days. Every day starts with you waking up in your dreadroom and going to school. Once you’re there, there are three time sections: Morning, Lunch, and After School. These are divided by an objective called Go to Class. Once you go to the assigned class, the next section starts. Before each class you meet with a club. The Student Council is scheduled in the morning while Fearleading, as well as Cooking Club, takes place at lunch. The rest of the club meetings are scheduled after school. This never changes and rarely is anything new added.

A photograph of Robecca Steam standing next to the robot that the player and the Robotic's club have just finished building. They are standing in front of various equipment which resembles that in a lab of a mad scientist. An image of a textbox showing that Robecca is currently saying: Finishing a robot with the Robotics after-school club (ofc, I named her Gaga)

Other than the repetitiveness, I really liked most of the side storylines of the after-school clubs. They made the story feel more alive. However, these end faster than the main storyline, which results in their time slot being empty during the late stages of the game, making the game feel hollowed out. They get replaced at the very end of the game, but only for a short while.

The pacing hurts the game in one more aspect – the main storyline progresses incredibly slowly. There were numerous occasions where the situation at the school was getting dire and it felt urgent to react, yet the characters would put it off by telling me to talk to them tomorrow for no reason other than to stall. A consistent thought I had was: “Bitch, we could talk about this now, you know?” It made me frustrated and I found myself picking up the game less frequently once I got to the middle of it since everything was moving at a snail’s pace. It felt like the creators didn’t have that much of a story to implement so they were padding it out.

A photograph showing the player in ther cheerleading (or fearleading) uniform. They are in the school gym, standing on a blue mat and doing a fearleading move called An image showing the fearleading rhythm mini-game during the The fearleading rhythm mini-game

Weird pacing aside, I enjoyed the main storyline and its quests as a whole. The story wasn’t groundbreaking, but it did have a few twists that I didn’t expect. The mechanics of solving said quests are entertaining. They push you to either explore the school by solving puzzles or play some type of mini-game. It may be a game targeted at kids but some of them are challenging and take a while to do. My favourite is probably the stealth puzzle that’s present in the late game. I would have loved to see it more.

One of my favourite mechanics of this game is the newsfeed on the player’s iCoffin. As you progress through the quests, different Monster High characters will post their opinions, tag each other, and use hashtags. It’s a really cute way to move the story forward, while also making the game feel more vibrant.

As far as I can tell, all of the voice actors from the Monster High webisodes and movies voiced their characters in the game! Only the main storyline is voiced, but it was still great to hear the characters we all know and love speak as they usually do in some capacity. Sometimes, the text displayed on the screen doesn’t match up with the lines being said all the way, but that’s a minor issue for me. The pitfall of the audio engineering of the New Ghoul in School are instances where multiple characters cheer at once. It just sounds like a jumbled mess. Those are the times when the text doesn’t match up almost at all.

Overall, I find this game enjoyable. I really liked the start and the end portions of it. The middle is where it fizzles out; as I said, it gets repetitive and feels dragged out for no reason. However, I can totally see myself replaying it. The exploration of the school is my favourite part, as a Monster High fan, but also because of the many collectibles you can find while doing so. It panders to my completionistic side. The 3DS game shows you the progress you’ve made in the game as a percentage each time you load it. Despite having completed every storyline and gained every collectible, my progress is at 92% because I haven’t purchased all of the clothing available. It really bugs me. Though I don’t see myself grinding just to do that, I see myself replaying this game once I recover from the dragged-on story. It was really freaking fun!

I hope you liked this gaming session we had today! Thank you for following my blog despite the wacky (lack of) schedule. I look forward to seeing you again now that I have finished college!

Sincerely,

Dorian

The blog’s header and the drawing featured atop this post were made by @ambybun on Instagram

The DVD cover featured on the drawing was made by me

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