The beta version of Randall’s Monday released a few months ago allowed us to get a good glimpse at this pop culture-laden point and click adventure. Now the full version of the game, including all seven chapters, is available worldwide. This review should let you know whether Randall’s Monday is really worth checking out if you’re a fan of the genre, or whether you should strike it from your calendar.
Sticky fingers
Before Randal’s fateful week even begins, things take a turn for the worse on Sunday evening. Randal is hanging out at the bar with his best buddy Matt and his girlfriend Sally, and the beer is flowing freely. Matt goes out back to puke his guts up, losing his wallet in the process. Nothing less than his best friend’s engagement ring falls into the hands of the kleptomaniac Randal, who’s none too eager to give it back, and decides to keep it for himself for the time being. The following morning, everything starts to go wrong, beginning with the landlord standing outside the door angrily demanding that Randal pay him the last three months’ rent.
There’s no getting out of it this time, and a daring escape via the fire escape leads to the next disaster, as Randal gets fired from his job as an errand boy. In his self-inflicted destitution, Randal is left with one more, less-than-ethical option – to sell his friend’s engagement ring to a sleazy pawnbroker for a considerable sum of money. This turns out to be a fatal decision, as the player as Randal is forced to repeat the same day over and over again. He’s stuck in a time warp, and his progressively complicated attempts to get the apparently cursed ring back end up throwing the space-time continuum completely out of whack. Every day is Monday now, with noticeable changes to Randal’s surroundings each time. Matt commits suicide each (Mon)day, and the whole neighborhood seems to have gone insane. But only Randal, a foul-mouthed bum, and HAL, the security system at the comic shop, really know what’s going on. No one else has a clue.
In seven extensive chapters that take a total of about 16 hours to complete, Randal’s Monday attempts to explore a theme that has been successfully dealt with in movies like Groundhog Day and Back to the Future. But in contrast to the adventure at hand, the creators of these masterpieces did a much better job of thinking things through. True, there are a lot of interesting plot twists and surprises, but there are so many blatant plot holes that it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the developers were unable to deal with the concepts involved in the game at all. In any event, after playing for a few hours you just have to accept the fact that the storyline makes no sense. For example, why on earth does the appearance of the landlord and the barmaid change so drastically in comparison to other characters in the game? Full disclosure here: the game itself has no decent answer to questions like this.
Instead, they attempt to make up for the game’s weaknesses by cramming it full of references to TV shows, movies, and video games from what feels like the past one hundred years. Some of them are funny, yeah, but the vast majority are just cringeworthy. There’s not one scene in the game that isn’t crawling with them. It doesn’t take long for the human eye to become overwhelmed with the sheer amount of visual references found in every corner of the game, and the long-winded and meandering dialogue will sometimes leave you feeling like a hapless bystander as you try to follow jokes based on stuff you forgot about years ago, and with good reason. Randal’s Monday is not above taking dialogue to the meta-level, either, such as the running commentary on items in your inventory. Still, the jokes can be pretty funny sometimes, if you like crude, in-your-face humor. It’s a real feast for sundry nerds, freaks, and geeks who just can’t get enough. There’s not going to be much middle ground – people are either going to love this game or hate it enough to delete it forever.
Unfortunately, they really manage to muck up the balancing act between sympathy and aversion when it comes to the game’s main character Randal. His negative character traits ensure that he remains consistently unlikeable throughout the entire game. When compared with Rufus from Deponia, this annoying jerk just doesn’t hold up. Even early in the game, his behavior is grating – he loves to stick his fingers in other people’s pockets, and he turns his back on the player surprisingly often. He is consistently arrogant, obscene, uppity, dishonest, and remorseless, and his behavior always ends up hurting people. This means that several moments that would have otherwise been funny end up falling flat because they involve such an unlikable person. The supporting characters are a little bit funnier, but with very few exceptions, all of them turn out to be just as obnoxious. The only one I still liked by the end of the game was Murray the policemen.
Hard to follow
At its core, Randal’s Monday is a solid point and click adventure. Randal moves at a leisurely pace through his surroundings, controlled using the mouse (or a controller), conducts meandering dialogues with NPCs, examines objects to use them, combine them, or store them in an arcane and confusing inventory system. The inventory is designed like a comic book and doesn’t take long to fill it up, and you constantly have to flip back and forth through the pages, especially since one you use an item, you have to go back and re-equip it if you want to use it again. Despite the fact that there’s a hotspot feature you can use at any time, it’s still easy to overlook individual objects, meaning you’ll have to scour certain scenes from top to bottom. To add insult to injury, there are some items you can’t even pick up until the game decides you’re ready to. At least the very practical subway system saves you from having to walk back and forth between scenes you’ve already visited.
The quality of the puzzles in Randal’s Monday is hit-or-miss. A lot of them simply defy all understanding, and some are so complicated it’s ridiculous. I guess it makes sense that glue is such a powerful substance in this bizarre world, but why you have to use a cute little koala bear together with a hammer in order to be able to interact with another person is something that I can’t make any sense of. There are lots of cases where there seems to be more than one way to solve a puzzle, but then the game won’t let you proceed unless you do it a certain exact way. How else do you explain why a sponge can only be used with the puddle behind the bar and not with the one in front of Randal’s apartment? Overall, Randal and his surroundings are stingy with clues, so it’s worth checking out the inventory’s help system. However, you should be aware that you’re not going to find clues here, but the solution to the entire puzzle. But even when you can read through the whole thing, there’s too much that still doesn’t make any sense.
Some like it coarse and vulgar
The game features bold, simple graphics – all the scenes, items, and big-headed characters work together to produce an overall picture that resembles a 2D animated TV show. The game never reaches the level of detail you see in Deponia or The Night of the Rabbit, however, as the lines much cruder and the contours thicker in comparison to the lighter and more refined style seen in those games. A lot of animations are just hinted at, especially since the main character turns his back on the player surprisingly often. Lots of people are going to find the relentless stream of vulgar language to be simply unbearable. The characters prefer to pepper their speech with expletives of all kinds, and hardly ever end a sentence without insulting someone. It’s even more perplexing when you see certain characters using the kind of gutter talk you just wouldn’t expect them to. Voiceovers are available in English, German, and Spanish, though the English ones are best, as they feature Jeff Anderson as Randal (who played Randal Graves in Clerks and Clerks II), as well as Jason Mewes, aka Jay, of “Jay and Silent Bob” fame. The sound effects and background music are hardly even noticeable.
