If you're inclined to play a mature game with mature decision-making, I do highly recommend Always Sometimes Monsters. The game smartly tests how effectively you choices play out in the final act, something I don't wish to spoil but Vagabond Dogs deserves praise for.
A mature adventure game that challenges you with hard choices and puts you in real life situations. The writing is not always at top level, but when it works it's great.
this game is such a masterpiece. its very mature. i dont speak english and i play it anyway, well im just here to say that its the first RPG Maker Game where its just so mature. it contains: racism, sexism, ****, transphobia, mental health, sexual assault, child abuse, animal abuse, drug abuse, and suicide. im just saying that this game in my opinion is a masterpiece.
It's an earnest look at life under tough economic pressure, at love when things don't go according to plan and at a creative career during its shittiest lows. It has a lot to say, and importantly, it speaks from the heart.
If you're a gamer who likes action, then you'll probably want to skip the game, but if you want a game with a story that explores the human psyche, then Always Sometimes Monsters may be right up your alley.
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 and moving – but hard to call ‘fun’.
A great example of an eyesore spit out by indie devs convinced that only the story matters. The worst part is that they had no idea how to write the story to avoid it being a cliché running with the pack of sad, moving indie games. [08/2014, p.69]
Always Sometimes Monsters is a unique RPG made by Vagabond Dog with publishing services by Devolver Digital. The price is $9.99, with sales available on Steam, and is available on PC. The aim of the game is to tell a story of choice and consequence that reverberates the human experience. The question is, does it succeed?
Story and Dialogue
The story follows your choice of character on a mission to get from east coast to west to see the ex of your choice. You’re flat broke, making the trip an almost epic adventure. This is the true beauty of this game. The story is a very real telling of what it is like to have an obstacle in front of you without having the luxury of being able to throw money at the problem. Finding a couch to sleep on feels like a blessing after having to sleep outside a few nights. As it should. The dialogue between characters comes off naturally and smooth compared to some other RPGs out there, and the colorful cast of characters never tend to filter too much. Playing the story of ASM felt very much like playing through an indie film, or a gritty show from FX or HBO, and the experience is an awesome one.
Control
The game plays as well as any other game made with RPG Maker. Everything is solid in the fact that pushing buttons makes things happen. There is no reinvention of the wheel here as it is not needed. If you’ve played any RPG since the SNES you probably know how the controls feel.
Art
The character portraits are nice to look at and the in game sprites are reminiscent of old school RPGs. The towns are a perfect size and layout being big enough to explore but small enough to remember where you’re going. Small details set off the overall feel of the game, whether it’s a stray piece of graffiti or campaign posters plastered around. The only problem I experienced was the floor looking like a curb once and I didn’t think I could walk any farther when I could.
Sound
Menu sound effects are a delicious 16bit variety, and the soundtrack absolutely shines here. It never got on my nerves and there are a few tracks on there that are solid arguments for buying the soundtrack.
Fun
This category is a tricky one. Always Sometimes Monsters is not necessarily a fun game. The mini games are a bit of social commentary or an in-joke. The game itself is not aiming to be fun or offering a new mechanic that could be manipulated for your own fun. The star of the show is the story and in that respect ASM is a blast. I have multiple replays planned for different actions and to see the different dialogues. The story wanted to share the human experience, and this is how I’ll judge the game in this category. ASM is the only game I can think of off the top of my head that made me reflect on my actual life. The final hour or so offered a story and series of choices that forced me to reflect on similar situations. I had my ending plotted out in my head before a few of the last elements played out, and once they did my game played out the opposite way. The game did not actively manipulate me into choosing something different, but the story put me into such a mindset that this happened anyway.
Final Tally
Always Sometimes Monsters is a beautiful experience. Beauty does not always mean pleasant or fun or joyful. ASM is a defining moment in the video games can be art argument. Not everyone will like it. Some typical gamers will flat out hate it. But if you’re not typical, and if story matters to you more than twitch reflex, then by all means buy this game.
Score: 10 – Buy Now
This game is an experience.
First, let's be clear :
DON'T buy this game if :
- You don"t speack English
- You don't like to read (there is a LOT of dialog)
- You are not an open-mind person
- You are alergic to the old school graphics
So, Always Sometimes Monster will show you basically what type of person you are :
Are you ready to work hard to get a few legit money to eat a sandwish, but not enought to sleep into a confortable bed, or are you ready to take the money of an old lady for your own confort ?
If someone is bad at you, will you injure him or will you investigate to find something that could make him jobless ?
Do you want to live in the past and try to find the lost love of your life, or do you want to live to the futur, without her/him ?
Always sometimes monsters
Not always the hero
Always sometimes monsters is a bit of a life simulator where you play as a writer...
the game starts with you choosing a character and then choosing that characters boyfriend or girlfriend…
And then it smacks you with life
you lose your job as writer
your partner leaves you
you’re evicted from your apartment and you getting a wedding invite to guess who’s wedding?
And you spend the 9 and a half hours of this game trying to get to your exes wedding
Being broke and now homeless, doing this is no easy feat, so it’s up to you to get from city to city by helping out characters around the world, or you could straight up just buy a bus ticket..
Either way it’s a day in and day out grind of hustling…
You can get a job chopping up animals or tofu...
Do odd jobs around the city for a few dollars or invest in sandwich stocks at the bacon shop... but there’s more fun to be had in solving the problems of the town and its inhabitants
The game does a great job of making the day to day grind feel real, of finally thinking you almost have enough to pay rent and then realizing, right.. I have to eat… spending my days’ worth of work money on some food so I can fall asleep...
And while sleeping you’ll occasionally have a dream about your ex... Indicating you may not quite be over them... and your intentions for arriving to this wedding might not be so pure... or maybe they are... it’s up to you... the game is full of choice
from writing about your day before you go to sleep to making choices around the world to get on peoples good sides so that they’ll scratch you’re back later on… while at the same time making sure a choice you make for one person doesn’t affect another..
The game isn’t in your face about choices mattering, but every once in a while I got smacked with the realization that if I made a different choice earlier... this solution to get to the next town probably wouldn’t have worked…
this cycle of rise and grind continues through all 9 and a half hrs. just with different towns and different jobs.. Jobs that feel as tedious as they would in real life…
So the game does a great job at immersing you into its world…
however I feel the game overstays its welcome a bit... there’s a section in the middle where the game wants you to get involved in politics for a town I had no connection to and I didn’t care for…
This town is when I really started to get bored with the grind of getting through the day to day with this game and just saved up for a bus tickets as fast as I could ignored its problems and left to the next town…
A town a little more interesting but still… I was over the gameplay and grind so I rushed through getting out of this section as well, trying to get to this wedding as fast as I could…
Performance wise, I did run into a crash every couple of hrs, and the game would freeze up for a few seconds every now and then, but nothing too annoying to deal with
Despite overstaying its welcome, Always sometimes monsters does a great job at feeling alive..
The world feels lived in, immerses you and makes you think about yourself in ways that few video games do…
It’s worth picking up and playing through, but I don’t believe its best played in one sitting or even 2 like I tried to do
I give Always sometimes monsters
a 7/10
After The Video Review Quickie : Always Sometimes Monsters
Total play time : 3 Hours
Price: $9.99
This game isn't a bad game it's actually a pretty good one, but I don't really feel like playing any more of it due to the fact that I HATE timers in video games and this game has a thirty day timer (you have to make it from one area to another in thirty days), but it does have interesting ideas like no combat and even though the game is pretty text heavy it never feels boring to read the text (mainly because they don’t just throw a book at you and call it story, I'm looking at you Space Rangers, Wasteland, Labyriona, Skyrim, etc), also even though I didn’t get very far what I saw in the story I really liked even though it reminds me of a bunch of movies where the guy/girl loses the guy/girl and he/she gets married and invites him/her to the wedding.
So this game isn't for me but I would have never picked it up if I knew it had timer game-play in it, and aside from that the time I’ve spent with the game wasn’t bad and as I said before this is actually a good game and one I can recommend, but only to those who know what they’re getting themselves into and don’t go in expecting one thing only to get another so my final rating is 7/10 a good game.
This game is kind of a surprise. I did not know about it - but almost instantly liked it.
pro:
- lovely drawn characters and a lot of choice makes a re-play just as enjoyable as the first time
- the story is nicely done, not amazing in terms of creativity but enjoyable enough
- many of the characters are quite relatable and the "world" does have a nice feeling
con:
- not as open world and choice-based as it may want to be
- the artstyle, while being good, could have been so much better. especially in terms of customization of character
- the UI / engine is fairly bad. screen resize, controls and all that is either not customizable at all or lacking.
my final thought:
a very good game well worth the money! - but also a game that could have been ( and hopefully may become - as in sequel or something .. ) much, MUCH more. what i did not like too much was the mixture between a pretty mature topic / story - and very simplistic chores or minigames.
SummaryAlways Sometimes Monsters is the story of life, love, and the things we will go through to find happiness in both. Set out on a journey through the modern human experience as you overcome the heartbreak of lost love, and the hardship of making choices that affect your life and the lives of those around you.