Randal's Monday

Written by Chapel Collins on 10/31/2014 for PC  

Randal's Monday puts you in the shoes of Randal Hicks, who is, in the game's own words, a sociopath and a kleptomaniac. The game opens in a bar, and almost immediately you start to dislike Randal (in a good way). Right away the game hits you over the head with Randal's drunken, selfish attitude and it's not five minutes in before he steals his even drunker friend's wallet. Inside the wallet is his friend's engagement ring, which turns out to be cursed and sets the plot of the game in motion.

Randal's Monday is a point-and-click adventure game, with heavy emphasis on using and combining items you discover around the map to solve puzzles. These puzzles usually function as segues between the dialogue segments of the game. You are given a few dialogue options to choose from in most conversations, but your choices don't really affect the game; most of the time you have to go through all of them in order for the game to proceed, and then it's on to the next puzzle segment. Gameplay mostly consists of these puzzles. Some of them seemed kind of illogical or required you to have picked up an easily missable item several screens back. I got stuck very early on because I missed a tube of glue on a trashcan that was only a few pixels wide. Thankfully, the game lets you hold down the space bar and it brings up indicators all over the screen of items you can click on. This is a good way to make sure you don't miss anything, but it doesn't help much with the illogical aspect of the puzzles. It seemed to me that the game could have given the player a little more to go on when trying to solve these puzzles from time to time, because often the clues are so cryptic that they don't jump out to you as clues at all---one of the first puzzles required me to combine a rubber duckie and a broom in order to reach a latch for a fire escape. The only clue I had to go on for that combo was something Randal said 15 minutes earlier about using the broom to change the channel on the TV. In hindsight, it's actually a very clever clue, but I feel like some other clues in the game just went straight over my head, as I was lost more than I would have liked. It was a little to often that I solved the puzzles by trial and error, which resulted in puzzles that weren't brain teasers as much as frustrating science experiments that I just needed to work through in order to reach the next cutscene.

Randal is voiced by Jeff Anderson, who played Randal Graves in the Kevin Smith movies Clerks and Clerks II. This Randal, while not technically the same as the Clerks Randal, has the same snarky, good-for-nothing attitude and wit, and is clearly written with Randal Graves in mind. Anderson does a really good job with the voice acting too. It's annoying, but it's supposed to be. Fans of Kevin Smith will feel right at home with the writing, which is at worst very funny, but is definitely played towards a very specific group of people.

That's the thing with this game. It has what I think is going to be a far too specific target audience. That's not to say that it's a bad game at all; in fact, I feel like the game is exactly what the developers wanted it to be. But if this kind of game isn't exactly your cup of tea, it won't welcome you into it with open arms. Not only because the puzzles are really quite difficult, but also because I feel during the development of this game, the humor was always what came first, and if that humor doesn't align with the player's sense of humor, the full effect will be lost. That isn't necessarily a negative however; the same could be said of Borderlands. Only in the case of Borderlands, there was also an FPS, a genre that appeals to nearly everyone, whereas Randal's Monday is a point-and-click adventure, a genre that appeals to a much narrower crowd. All I mean to say is that if the game's humor and gameplay both don't appeal to you, the game might not be for you.

But, if crude humor and puzzles sound like something you can dig, check out Randal's Monday when it releases sometime this winter. It will be right up your alley.