Always the Story, Sometimes the Choices, Mostly Monsters

Always Sometimes Monsters is an indie game by Vagabond Dog and Devolver Digital. The first time you load it up, you’ll see a tiny (560x454) window with the game logo and 3 buttons – New Game, Credits, and Quit. Yeah, no options. This is a pretty simple game. You can adjust the window by pressing F6 or F7, which make the window bigger and fullscreen respectively. If it didn’t have those options, the size of the window would make Always Sometimes Monsters pretty much unplayable.

When you press New Game, a cutscene will start. This shows a hitman walking away from his employer, trying and failing to quit. He’s interrupted by a random guy on the street, who offers to tell him a story. You have the choice to shoot the guy or listen to the story – shooting the guy will end in the guy dying, and the hitman carrying on with his life. Game over.

A few things happen in quick succession if you choose the (obviously intended) listen option. The guy tells the story of a man hosting a party, as a celebration for his new job. He talks to a bunch of people, and you choose someone for him to drink with. All of a sudden, the character you’re controlling switches for the third time. The person you chose to drink with needs to go out to the balcony to fetch his/her partner.

After a little bit of this, it becomes apparent that this is the character you’re going to be controlling for most of the game, which is good because I was starting to get motion sickness from all the body-jumping!

Fast forward a year and your partner left you, you’re about to get kicked out of your flat, and your book deal is falling through. To top it all off, once you’ve been evicted you find that you’re not getting any more cash for the book you were supposed to be writing, and your ex is now getting married halfway across the country in a month. So what do you do? Scrounge together as much money as you can from wherever you can get it and rush madly across the country to stop him/her, of course!

The core of the game consists of controlling this third character through various scenarios. It’s pretty open-ended, even though there’s a final goal. For the most part, you explore the town and try to get money. There are a few work minigames that mean that it’s impossible to run out of cash, but these can be avoided if you do all of the ‘quests’ correctly.

The inventory management leaves a bit to be desired and sometimes it’s not overly clear what you need to do. Overall though, this simplistic gameplay works quite well. The majority of the game is plot, and that’s how it should be.

This is a game about decisions, and how each decision we make affects both us and those around us. Even the first decision of the game, whether or not to listen to the guy on the street, has an enormous impact on the game. Sure, they could have forced you to listen, but that would have taken away from the message. You come across situations throughout where you need to decide if you’re going to do the right thing or the thing that will further your own goals, and there’s a ‘fate’ score that reflects how much of a dick you’ve been. In the end, you only have 30 days to raise the cash you need though, so sometimes being a dick is necessary. Through the game, the player is constantly presented with interesting choices – some of these have no impact and others have impact far beyond what you might first expect.

I should level with you at this point: I haven’t finished this game yet. Steam tells me that I’ve been playing for 3 hours, so I expect a good 2-5 more hours before I do so. Maybe my story will end with my protagonists (Samantha and Lizzie) reuniting. Maybe not. But that’s what this game is about. We don’t know how it’s going to end, we don’t know when it’s going to end. What we do know is that our decisions matter, and when it does end everything that happens will have been as a result of the choices we made along the way.

Trigger warning: Always Sometimes Monsters has content with racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, mental health, sexual assault, child abuse, animal abuse, drug abuse, and suicide.

Always Sometimes Monsters is available from the Humble Store (with a Steam key) or directly from Steam for $9.99 or £6.99 respectively.