Always Sometimes Monsters Review

Wait, no, I tell a lie, story isn't everything: there are jobs. Yeah, jobs. What do you think this is, junior, some kind of video game? A means of entertainment? Well sod off, there's no room for fun in this heartbreaking tale about a person you never meet. If you want to make money – and you will, because in several cases the only way to proceed is to raise an arbitrary sum – you'll have to pick up a job of some kind, usually at the local employment centre. These cause, without exception, brain cell genocide. They are repetitive, dull, menial tasks, the sort of thing that would be carried out by a machine in a world with any semblance of sanity. I'd say they were the game's grind, but even the grinding of other games at least tries to dress up its monotony with flashy battle sequences and the addictive 'ding' of the level-up sound. This is you, locked in a room, forced to complete excruciatingly boring tasks for money. Now look, I get it, Always Sometimes Monsters: you want to communicate the mind-numbing pain of having to be self-sufficient at society's very lowest rung. It's not supposed to be fun. Fine, but deliberately boring is still boring no matter how much of an artistic statement it makes, and really, was there no better way of bringing this across without actually smacking us with a sock full of solidified tedium? I got the gist after about thirty seconds: unemployment is depressing, let's try extra-hard to get that publishing contract. Done. No more packaging tofu, please.

Enough of that, let's get back to those decisions. Early on the game actually insists that there are no right or wrong choices, and that it's all just a matter of choosing whatever you want and seeing how it plays out, but such a statement rings just a tad hollow when some sets of choices will leave you with inexplicable fame and fortune and others will leave you dying in a filthy back-alley, sniffing two-stroke petrol out of a crinkled old juice box. How can you possibly present both options as equally viable when one is clearly superior? An ending is supposed to provide a resolution, wrapping up everything the story has been leading up to in such a way that leaves the player satisfied. How can anybody look at an outcome where they have unequivocally failed, get up from the computer and think “I'm glad things went like that”? That's not an ending, that's just a game-over screen with its hat brim pulled over its face. I haven't even touched on the parts of the game where singular decisions can give you a huge advantage, such as when answering a series of questions correctly prevents an office worker from committing suicide, granting you a free ride to the next city and saving you several hundred dollars. Imagine if we extended this to other games. “No, no, being shot five times in the head by that alien grunt halfway through the third level is just an alternative ending. You just chose not to shoot him first because you were staring at a wall, and the game reacted accordingly.”

Even the choices that genuinely provide equally-viable routes often feel constrictive. I like that the game will present you with legitimately challenging moral decisions – making it remarkably difficult to be a good person and still succeed, as opposed to the usual moral choice system in games where you're just given the option of how much of a knob-head you want to be – but almost everything you do comes in the form of a binary choice between two options. This makes sense for simple choices – steal an item or leave it, agree with somebody or disagree – but the game tends to back you into a corner in order to achieve this format, leaving you to choose between the lesser of the two evils even while an obvious not-evil solution jumps up and down in the background, hand raised eagerly. One story thread has you breaking into a town hall and hacking their server for the express purpose of rigging an election, letting you choose between a candidate who's corrupt but stable – the person who commissioned you to carry out this little bit of subterfuge – and a candidate who's rightfully calling for change but might be planning to take things too far. Great, another genuine moral choice. Why do I have to pick one of the two, though? Can't I just pretend that I hacked the server and lie when I report back to the guy? The story sort of gets around this by telling you that another person will hack the server in the revolutionary candidate's favour if you don't get there first, but that leaves us with an extremely pertinent question: why don't we go back and tell the security forces currently guarding the building that this is going to happen? You see, you can talk about choice all you like, but if you boil everything down to a decision between two options then it's either going to get awfully contrived, or the plot is going to have so many holes in it that even the world's most lax building safety committee would condemn it for being structurally unsound.

Wait a minute, breaking into a town hall and hacking their election server? Yeah, remember the contemporary cross-country love story we were supposed to be experiencing? Well, every now and then the main story writer must have taken a break, and in these moments I can only presume that his roommate – who has a penchant for spy flicks and whose all-time favourite game is Operation Stealth – sneaked into his room with the intention of spicing things up, slotting in a few paragraphs here and there wherever he could. The story has a perplexing tendency to occasionally drop everything and shift, with barely any set-up, into the realm of the extremely improbable, seemingly for no reason except to make itself seem more interesting than it actually is. As well as our very own 'Mission Impossible: Small Town Politics Edition' – which, by the way, also involves somehow being caught by several armed guards and still getting away scot-free without so much as a suspect profile – there's also a sequence where you sneak into a heavily guarded mansion, and one particular bit very near the end that had me practically gaping with disbelief. I won't spoil the specifics of that, but it involves a character going ten thousand dollars into debt overnight, Fork Parker turning up out of nowhere, and you getting nearly shot by a hired thug in a casino back-room. The story has to climax one way or another, right?

Unsurprisingly, this all helps contribute to a tone doesn't so much 'vary' as it does 'swing wildly around like a bedspread in a hurricane', but it's not the only cause. While it's definitely admirable how much the narrative can bend and still get back on track, some of the events just seem like they would have a far more widespread effect than what you actually witness. There's no urgency, no sense of impact; things just happen, your character reacts to them, and then the status quo is restored. In one such side-story, I witnessed a redneck practically vapourise his nephew with a shotgun, Doom-style, and just barely escaped with my life after bludgeoning the man to death with a tyre-iron. So what did I do now? Call the police? Keel over and whimper for half an hour? Suffer long-lasting psychological damage? Nope, I walked back to town and bought a burger. All that had changed was that I now had an extra hundred dollars in my pocket. Life goes on, I guess.

Let me soothe your wounds for a moment, Always Sometimes Monsters. For all the game's faults, there's no denying that it's a remarkable piece of work. It's intricate, utterly unique and full of compelling dialogue. The one thing it isn't, however, is fun, which is one feature that seems to be rapidly sliding to the bottom of many indie developers' priority lists like an unwanted baby in a ball pit. I don't care if the awful minigames are making a statement; they're still awful, I still have to play them, and any appreciation I might have of their message is swiftly drowned in tsunami of boredom that they stir up. The game flows like the contents of the waste outlet pipe at the nougat factory, the decisions are more often than not products of improbable circumstances, and the ending that I got wasn't so much a gripping finale as an excuse to raise an eyebrow and say “is that it?” It's the kind of game that is significant because of what it represents, rather than what it actually does in practice. What it represents is a truly original style of game driven by genuine moral difficulties; what it actually does is bring across the sense of having a miserable, desperately hopeless life just a little bit too well.