RANDAL’S MONDAY
Deveoped by Nexus Game Studios
Published by Daedalic Entertainment
Available on Steam for PC
Randal’s Monday is a point-and-click adventure game for the PC where every day is Monday!
You play as Randal, a kleptomaniac sociopath, who steals his best friend Matt’s wallet after celebrating Matt and Sally’s engagement party at Clayton’s Cave bar the night before. Kept awake with a bum in the alley shouting “Cursed!”, Randal finally discovers just what he means when Monday begins over and over again a la Groundhog Day. Randal must correct his ways but be careful about disrupting the space-time continium as everything he does affects the next Monday!
There’s many point-and-click adventure games out there, such as Deponia, but Randal’s Monday is a game with a difference – it’s loaded with pop culture references that the nerd in you will absolutely squeal about. Such references include Blade Runner, Shaun of the Dead, Hellraiser, Fight Club and even Trainspotting.
Whilst the pop culture references are quite fun to notice in the game, the dialogue and story is quite a drain. The dialogue in Randal’s Monday is often slowly paced, which fortunately you can skip, and the conversations seem to go on for what feels like eternity. Black humour, sarcasm and Kevin Smith style script litters the game, but I’ve yet to laugh once. Then again, I don’t ‘get’ Kevin Smith movies either, which doesn’t help matters. So what we end up with is a game where 80% of the time you have to sit through the characters reeling off their lines before you can actually do anything and 90% of that time the characters are talking random stuff that I couldn’t less about.
The storyline of the game has the character of Randal in a variety of locations, from his apartment, the subway station, Mel’s Pawn Shop, Clayton’s Cave, Charlie’s Comic Book shop and Matt’s house. In each of these places, there’s often clickable items and people to interact with, some of which you can pick up and add to your inventory (items that is!). These useful items can be separated or combined to help solve a situation in the game, so it’s worthwhile clicking everything that you can in each area. When the puzzles do arise, they are at first easy to solve. As you spend a bit of time on the game, the difficulty goes up and you may well find yourself scratching your head as to which object to combine and use to fix a problem, and also where to go next on the map. There is a cheat tips guide within the game to help you if you wish, and there’s many internet guides out there to give you a helping hand if you’re not too bothered about doing the game alone without help and just want to finish the story.
The artwork design of Randal’s Monday is pretty impressive, from the characters right down to the little poster and ornaments in the shops and apartments within Randal’s town. As I mentioned, it’s fun to notice things in the background that you didn’t initially see, and the amount of film and TV this game nods to through artwork and dialogue is incredible. It is this element which keeps the player alert, as the main storyline of the game, with its slow dialogue, is quite a drag.
Available on Steam for PC, Randal’s Monday has 21 unlockable Steam achievements and provides Steam trading cards, dropping a maximum of three whilst playing the game. It is said to have partial support for the controller but being a point-and-click game, gameplay is better done with the mouse. You don’t really need to use anythng else anyway. If you’re like me and can read subtitles faster than the characters speak, you’ll be happy to know the left mouse button can be clicked to skip onto the next piece of dialogue, which definitely helps to speed up the game, though be warned, it’s still a long affair.
Depending on what you enjoy about point-and-click games, you may well like Randal’s Monday. Unfortunately, I found it overlong and unfunny to the point that I wasn’t enjoying my time playing the game. Only the pop culture references appealed to me, but sadly that’s not enough to make this an entertaining gaming experience.
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