Always Sometimes Monsters is a unique role-playing game set in the modern world. You take on the life of your character for 30 days as you try and make it from the east coast to the west coast before your one true love marries someone else.
Along the way you'll face a myriad of choices that will alter the course of your journey and change the fate of your character. These decisions will affect the characters you encounter and the world around them, but few things are ever as binary as right and wrong. Your unique story will be shaped by your personal ethical compass, with none other like it.
Indie developer Vagabond Dog and edgy publisher Devolver Digital have put together a visually charming, audibly impressive, but otherwise unfulfilling little title that I doubt I would return to. The 9 hour journey from beginning to end is a tumultuous one, filled with depressive tendencies, impossible choices, monotonous repetition, and nary a decent...
'Always Sometimes Monsters' is an RPG-maker game that impresses with its choice-based narrative and effective writing, despite some tedious grinding sections and basic pixel art.
Always sometimes monsters is a peculiar title. It manages to tell an interesting story, which is lucky considering it is little more than an interactive novel.
Always Sometimes Monsters again shows up that 'game' is a word whose time is done. There is nothing playful about this experience – it's a mixture of repetitive tasks that riddle your fingers with despair and increasingly-depressing plots. This then is a 'life failure' simulator, like Cliff Harris's sandbox Kudos 2. Like that, it's compelling, enlightening...
For now we will say that Always Sometimes Monsters is best described more as an interactive story rather than a video game. There simply isn't very much video game about it. Instead you try to guide your character forward during the strangest and often darkest point of their entire life.
