It is time to confront the terrible truth that I once took part in a school fashion show. I ran in two categories, Ballroom and Street, a serious test of range for a kid who had only just mastered the daredevil technique of wearing a shirt without a tie. In the Ballroom bracket, I was asked to do a waltz in an Indian wedding gown provided by a local sponsor who, I can only assume, immediately went out of business. In Street, I had to wear a Gap hoodtop and shoot a fire-eater (one of the Cool Teachers) with a Super Soaker, while some other lost soul moonwalked down the runway in a golden suit.

In retrospect, I am filing all this under the secret umbrella category of God’s Greatest Mistake. There is exactly no photographic evidence, and I will thank you not to search for any on Facebook. It’s so much less upsetting being a fashion model in Dance of Theseus, which might sound weird given that in Dance of Theseus, you don’t just swap outfits – you graft on new heads, arms and legs, either bought from sniffy griffon dressmakers or moulded together out of seashells, horned skulls, and scraps of shimmering hide. Created by Shanghai-based Citreat Studio, it’s a cheerful, colourful and somehow unrevolting life sim RPG with a kind of Balatro-esque Frankensteinmaxxing element. I’ve been playing the demo, and it’s both entertaining and a source of endless inspiration. Argh, if only I’d had access to this, when I was 16!!!

In Dance of Theseus you play Thea, a young plastic surgeon who tumbles through a hole and into the realm of monsters, losing an arm during the descent. Thea plonks down square in the middle of a fashion contest. The judges take one look at her bedraggled form and assume that she’s one of the contestants – and what’s a girl to do but glob together a new arm, sculpt her own gushing head wounds into a fetching scarlet hairpiece, and get busy racking up 10s.

At no point in the proceedings does Thea (e.g.) collapse wheezing due to a mixture of blood loss and utter terror. She’s a practical soul, and a big ego. No way is she going to be outclassed by a bunch of Grimm Fairytale rejects. Fortunately, Thea makes an immediate friend in Winks, a gabby butterfly creature cruelly derided as the least trendy monster in town. Winks kindly supplies Thea with both a place to stay and a golden crustacean claw to get her modelling career off the ground.

The game’s fashion competitions prove to be a mixture of deckbuilding and simple narrative puzzling. Before each round, you spend Stamina to ask the event’s judges which styles they favour – some might suggest you adopt “the colour of mystery”, or similar wording; others will hint that they’d love you to be an octopus right now. Then, you spend Sanity to stitch together an appropriate body from an inventory of monstrous limbs, picking colours and “textures” (such as fleshy or bony) to match the competition’s theme. Yes, this is a game with a Sanity bar, but not, so far, a ‘madness sim’ in the vein of Darkest Dungeon. It’s more like a Tim Burton movie with a touch of Pixar’s quippiness.

If you wow the judges, you’ll get extra points to spend on “dance moves” in a subsequent scoring round. Scoring sees you lining up your body parts and rating them one by one, with dance cards allowing you to jimmy the workings. You can do a waltz (egad! My old nemesis) to change the order of appendages and form a colour combo. Another card might let you transform a tufty yeti arm that clashes with the theme into an ultra-tasteful mantis leg. There are also climactic dance-offs against other named characters. During these boss battles, you can play cards to throw your opponent off, and mess with their scoring. Picture ‘accidentally’ stamping on a rival’s scorpion tail with your massive goat hoof.

Between runway jousts, Thea will retire to the monster village to work on her various looks. This part of the game is a gentle life sim with gaudy dollhouse aesthetics that remind me of noughties Facebook games. You can tour the monster world, buying fancy new elbows and whatnot at the big city store, or dream up your own anatomical eccentricities. There are minigames and resource spots to cycle through: fishing gets you food to replenish your stamina, while visiting the local volcano is how you’ll acquire dreamcatchers to restore your sanity.

You can also go on top-down, grid-based expeditions with a limited number of steps, to gather materials for your outfits. And you can grow a range of unsavoury textiles in your monster garden. Gathering and crafting aside, there are other characters sprinkled around the world map to befriend and romance. In the demo, I really hit it off with a smouldering demonboy called Supay, whose outfits leave little to the imagination in the sense that I think I can see his kidneys. He’s been sending me presents. Admittedly, most of the gifts so far are severed heads, but the thought is everything.

I’m enjoying the writing, not least because putting certain conventions for attractiveness under the knife appears to be a priority. Thea’s Disney-adjacent complexion is rather downmarket by hellworld standards. “What about you is pretty?” sneers an opposing clothes-horse (not an actual horse, though this would be entirely plausible), on the day of your arrival. “Your golden locks? Your symmetrical face? Your smooth skin? Your itty-bitty waist? The way you smell like citrus and rain? Beauty is about fear. If you don’t look like you can make a human scream in terror and run away, then what kind of monster are you?” What indeed. Again, this would have been great inspiration for me during my own catwalking days.

The caption for Thea’s replacement arm adds that “perhaps humanness was always just a mirage, a cleverly constructed optical illusion”. In Dance of Theseus, the illusion is yours to rearrange and distort as you see fit. It turns out that when they said beauty is in the eye of the beholder, they meant the one from D&D. Anyway, I am looking forward to getting my hands on a complete set of mantis limbs. The full game is out… soon. Read more on Steam.