Randal’s Monday (PC) Preview

This preview is based on a beta version released on September 15, 2014.

2014 has been a pretty run-of-the-mill year for classic point and click adventure games, with almost no highlights worth mentioning. But with Randal’s Monday, we might just have a ray of hope coming out before Christmas. The version we were able to test included three of the game’s seven chapters, and here’s what we thought. 

Just another day

The game’s protagonist Randal Hicks seems to have been cast in the mold of the classic anti-hero. Cocky and shiftless, he prefers to spend his time lying around drunk in bars or in his run-down apartment, and when he goes to work, he’s never on time. Sometimes, when he needs a little bit of cash, he simply snatches it from other people, even from his best friends if he’s in a real bind. This time, after a night of drunken revelry, he wakes up with his friend’s wallet in his pocket – and not just his wallet, but also the engagement ring he was planning to give to his girlfriend. From there, disaster takes it course, starting with the landlord standing outside the door demanding Randal pay him the last few months’ rent.

Using the fire escape to flee doesn’t really help the situation, as he ends up losing his job, too. His boss has finally had enough of his ridiculous shenanigans. In his despair, Randal sees only one solution: to hock his friend’s engagement ring at a seedy pawnshop. This turns out to be a big mistake. Like in Groundhog Day, Randal is forced to relive the same day over and over again and the next few chapters follow Randal’s attempts to break the curse.

Players will find that it’s hard to decide whether to love Randal or to hate him. While Rufus in Deponia was able to quickly win over the hearts of genre fans, Randal is a much more complicated matter. His tendency to stick his fingers in other people’s pockets or turn his back on the player are just surface manifestations of his profoundly bad character traits, including such behavioral patterns as arrogance, kleptomania, rudeness, dishonesty, and lack of empathy for his fellow human beings. Seeing how his attitude changes in the course of the remaining chapters will probably be one of the big draws of the full game. A variety of minor characters help add humor to the game. One of them that we really liked was the naïve police officer Murray, who believes everything Randal tells him, no matter how absurd it is.

Geekster’s Paradise

What might sound like a rather serious treatment of human behavior and its consequences is actually peppered throughout with heavy doses of humor, if not the kind that will suit everyone’s tastes. After a few hours of playing, it’s clear that the adventure demands a broad knowledge of video games, movies, and TV shows. But they manage to beat the proverbial dead horse into the ground here with all the puns and references – there’s just too many of them, and the whole things feels a bit forced. There’s hardly a scene or location that doesn’t make some pop culture reference, and the dialogue is also chock full of well-known quotes. Here are just a few of the references we picked up in the first hour: Space Invaders, Ghostbusters, The Big Lebowski, Back to the Future, The Lord of the Rings, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Mega Man, Super Mario Bros., Sin City, Planet of the Apes, The X-Files, Day of the Tentacle, Indiana Jones, The Simpsons, etc. It’s also worth mentioning that the game doesn’t tread lightly with sensitive topics, but digs right in, even covering topics like suicide.

Some folks might say that they overdid all this to make up for average (at best) gameplay. And behind the façade, Randal’s Monday is a rather solid, but standard point-and-click adventure with no surprises to speak of. Typical for the genre, you use your mouse to move Randal around on the screen at a leisurely pace, engage in multiple-choice dialogues, examine interesting objects, use them or combine them, or save them in your inventory. Despite a hot-spot feature that highlights important objects, it’s still easy to overlook individual ones, so you’d better make sure to search each scene thoroughly. In any case, newcomers to the genre might get lost pretty often with this one, as it’s not always immediately clear what your objective is. This is where the helpful journal feature can come in handy. You can also use subway connections to save you from having to go back through places you’ve already visited.

The difficulty of the puzzles seems to function between “I can totally figure this out” to “where the hell did this come from?” But if you just try to solve them and appreciate the fact that everything in Randal’s world is a bit crazy, you shouldn’t have a hard time solving even the toughest ones. For example, in Randal’s world, glue is especially effective, and I’m not even going to get into the devastating power of the globe in the security guard’s office, if it breaks free of its holder. But this is another place where this ambitious game seems to fall short of Deponia, Harvey’s New Eyes, and other instant classics of the genre – at least in the first three chapters.

A picturesque view

Don’t expect to find any new milestones here in terms of graphics. Nevertheless, all the scenes, big-headed characters, and objects really come together well to give the game a pretty decent overall feel. However, Randal’s Monday just doesn’t approach the wealth of detail and animation, as well as the living, breathing atmosphere of Deponia or the Night of the Rabbit, at least not yet. There’s really not much in the way of music or sound effects, but the voice acting is pretty good. Randal himself is voiced by Jeff Anderson, who played Randal Graves in the Kevin Smith films Clerks and Clerks II.