Uploaded August 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Playthrough of Funny Monsters for Tea, Ednovation’s 1995 interactive storybook and educational game for Windows 3.x. Built around a group of harmless, mischievous monsters invading an ordinary home, it mixes a short rhyming story with extensive point-and-click interaction and six educational activities. A later edition was published by Sunburst Technology in 1997 for Windows and Macintosh.
Rating: 7/10
The story begins with a young boy who is afraid of monsters despite being home during the daytime. Naturally, monsters soon appear, but instead of being frightening they turn out to be friendly, playful creatures who quickly become his companions. The game deliberately avoids anything genuinely scary, making it clearly aimed at younger children rather than trying to mix education with mild horror.
There are two main ways to experience the program, including a straightforward reading mode and Read & Play. The latter is easily the more interesting option, combining the complete story with interactive scenery and access to the educational games. Each story page contains narrated rhyming verses, with the spoken words highlighted on screen to encourage reading along. Pages are advanced manually, so children can progress at their own pace or return to earlier scenes.
What really gives Funny Monsters for Tea its personality is the amount of interaction hidden in the illustrations. Moving the mouse across a scene reveals numerous clickable hotspots, and almost every object seems capable of triggering some sort of animation, visual joke or monster appearance. Much of the enjoyment comes simply from investigating every corner of a room to see what happens. In this respect it is very similar to Broderbund’s Living Books titles, and the level of environmental interaction is unusually generous for such an obscure production.
The six educational activities are more substantial than the simple storybook structure initially suggests. Telling Time teaches analogue and digital clock reading, while Alphabet Soup turns spelling into a simple word-building exercise with several difficulty settings. Up the Stairs focuses on counting and basic arithmetic, with addition, subtraction, multiplication and division available as part of its number exercises.
The remaining activities lean more toward creativity. My Silly Poem asks players to complete deliberately absurd rhyming poems using a selection of words. Musical Monsters lets children arrange short sequences of sounds produced by monster musicians, while Monsters in a Box is essentially a creature-building toy where different heads, bodies and legs can be combined into bizarre creations.
Not every activity works equally well. Contemporary Children's Technology Review coverage specifically criticized the lack of clear on-screen help, and some exercises are less intuitive than they should be for the intended age group. The underlying mechanics also become repetitive fairly quickly, especially for anyone outside the preschool or early-primary audience.
Presentation is considerably stronger. The colorful hand-drawn artwork has plenty of character, the monsters are expressive without looking threatening, and the frequent animations make otherwise static storybook screens feel lively. Narration and sound effects are clear and plentiful, while the strange visual jokes give the game a slightly eccentric personality missing from many more clinical educational packages.
Funny Monsters for Tea is ultimately a small piece of mid-1990s edutainment rather than a conventional game, but it is an unusually charming one. Its educational activities are uneven and occasionally unclear, yet the interactive storybook portion is packed with amusing details and encourages exactly the kind of experimentation that made the best CD-ROM children's titles memorable. It may be obscure, but fans of Living Books-style software should find it a surprisingly enjoyable rediscovery.
Playthrough of Funny Monsters for Tea, Ednovation’s 1995 interactive storybook and educational game for Windows 3.x. Built around a group of harmless, mischievous monsters invading an ordinary home, it mixes a short rhyming story with extensive point-and-click interaction and six educational activities. A later edition was published by Sunburst Technology in 1997 for Windows and Macintosh.
Rating: 7/10
The story begins with a young boy who is afraid of monsters despite being home during the daytime. Naturally, monsters soon appear, but instead of being frightening they turn out to be friendly, playful creatures who quickly become his companions. The game deliberately avoids anything genuinely scary, making it clearly aimed at younger children rather than trying to mix education with mild horror.
There are two main ways to experience the program, including a straightforward reading mode and Read & Play. The latter is easily the more interesting option, combining the complete story with interactive scenery and access to the educational games. Each story page contains narrated rhyming verses, with the spoken words highlighted on screen to encourage reading along. Pages are advanced manually, so children can progress at their own pace or return to earlier scenes.
What really gives Funny Monsters for Tea its personality is the amount of interaction hidden in the illustrations. Moving the mouse across a scene reveals numerous clickable hotspots, and almost every object seems capable of triggering some sort of animation, visual joke or monster appearance. Much of the enjoyment comes simply from investigating every corner of a room to see what happens. In this respect it is very similar to Broderbund’s Living Books titles, and the level of environmental interaction is unusually generous for such an obscure production.
The six educational activities are more substantial than the simple storybook structure initially suggests. Telling Time teaches analogue and digital clock reading, while Alphabet Soup turns spelling into a simple word-building exercise with several difficulty settings. Up the Stairs focuses on counting and basic arithmetic, with addition, subtraction, multiplication and division available as part of its number exercises.
The remaining activities lean more toward creativity. My Silly Poem asks players to complete deliberately absurd rhyming poems using a selection of words. Musical Monsters lets children arrange short sequences of sounds produced by monster musicians, while Monsters in a Box is essentially a creature-building toy where different heads, bodies and legs can be combined into bizarre creations.
Not every activity works equally well. Contemporary Children's Technology Review coverage specifically criticized the lack of clear on-screen help, and some exercises are less intuitive than they should be for the intended age group. The underlying mechanics also become repetitive fairly quickly, especially for anyone outside the preschool or early-primary audience.
Presentation is considerably stronger. The colorful hand-drawn artwork has plenty of character, the monsters are expressive without looking threatening, and the frequent animations make otherwise static storybook screens feel lively. Narration and sound effects are clear and plentiful, while the strange visual jokes give the game a slightly eccentric personality missing from many more clinical educational packages.
Funny Monsters for Tea is ultimately a small piece of mid-1990s edutainment rather than a conventional game, but it is an unusually charming one. Its educational activities are uneven and occasionally unclear, yet the interactive storybook portion is packed with amusing details and encourages exactly the kind of experimentation that made the best CD-ROM children's titles memorable. It may be obscure, but fans of Living Books-style software should find it a surprisingly enjoyable rediscovery.
