Randal's Monday (PC) Review

Randal's Monday thrusts the player into the role of the titular Randal, an obnoxious drunk, monumental jerk, and frontrunner for the title of worst person in the gaming universe. His best friend is getting married to the woman of his dreams, so after a drunken night of partying, Randal decides the best course of action is to swipe his ring because the game wants to establish as quickly as possibly that he is an awful human being. The joke is on Randal though, because the ring he swipes ends up being cursed and it forces him to live the same day over and over again, every permutation seeming to end in his best friend's suicide. In order to break the cycle, he must return the ring to his friend and find some Monday that doesn't end in his friend's death. Gamers, meanwhile, is also in a desperate search to find some universe in which Randal's Monday isn't so unappealing.

This is a point-and-click adventure game at its most basic, and really anyone who has played one before already will know what to expect going in. Randal goes across several different Mondays picking up whatever items he can find and either combining them or hitting something with them until a puzzle is solved. There is an impressively large supporting cast to interact with, and talking to them will either help flesh out the story or provide some much needed clues as to exactly how to proceed. Inventory management is a breeze and everything controls perfectly. The formula here has barely changed compared to any similar title going back as far as the '80s or '90s, but this isn't the sort of genre that needs to be reinvented to be enjoyed. New and clever puzzles are the lifeblood of games like this, and Randal's Monday certainly has no shortage of puzzles to throw around. The issue is that there just aren't many that are very good.

Sure, there are a handful of clever ones that manage to be both challenging yet logical and really trigger that smarty-pants satisfaction centre of the human brain. That sort of satisfaction is a fleeting feeling, unfortunately, and the vast majority of the puzzles are uninteresting, nonsensical messes. There is nothing wrong with puzzles being hard, and the old classics of the genre always threw a handful of diabolically tricky puzzles in the mix. These, however, are just illogical, requiring a string of thought that no one could even guess at. There are bunches of puzzles in this game that seem to be easily solvable by something in the inventory, only for the actual solution to be something else that barely follows any sort of string of common sense. Solutions are more likely to be found by just randomly guessing at items in the inventory, and even when a puzzle is solved it is more likely to elicit a sigh of relief for it being over than any sort of actual joy.

The whole system just isn't enjoyable, and many of the puzzles require tedious backtracking through large environments just to find the one little item needed to solve the puzzle. Randal's inventory quickly becomes bloated with too many items relatively quickly making puzzles even more of a chore to tackle. There is a hint system that should help with some of the more difficult ones, but these end up being less "hint" and more "the actual solution to the puzzle" instead. A little clue would have been nice, but instead the game seems to just roll its eyes and sigh before just giving out the solution because it doesn't want to waste any more time. A nice, challenging point-and-click adventure game is a great thing, but this isn't even a real challenge. This is just a game asking the player to pick a random number between 1 and blorp, getting frustrated and giving out the answer when nobody can figure it out.

Perhaps the biggest issue with the game, even more than the obtuse puzzle design, is how amazingly and spectacularly unfunny the whole experience is. This is a game trying its hardest to get the player to laugh and failing in an almost historic fashion. There is an amazing cameo at one point in the game and maybe a handful of other lines that might elicit a smile, but for the most part Randal's Monday has the comedic timing of Sophie's Choice. The script is almost drowning in pop culture references, making an aside to any number of things just so the game can go, "Hey? Remember that? That was a thing." That is the extent of the joke most of the time. This isn't even referential humour. This is just acknowledging that things exist without remembering to attach a punchline. Even ignoring the absolute tsunami of awkward referential humour, Randal's Monday never learns how to tell a joke, leaving most of the game painfully awkward to get through. There is almost nothing worse than someone or something being earnestly unfunny, and Randal's Monday spends almost the entirety of its 10-15 hours of playtime just murdering the concept of comedy in front of the player.

Part of the issue comes from how bad the script is, and even the cast of Monkey Island couldn't make these jokes funny. Unfortunately, on top of the bad script, Randal's Monday features the most abysmal cast of characters ever put together in an adventure game. This seems to be a running theme for Daedalic games, where each cast is trying feverishly to out-bad the last one. One of the common complaints for the Deponia series, for example, was just how bad the main character Rufus was throughout the course of the adventure. This sort of hatred always seemed misplaced because not only was Rufus funny in a snarky sort of way at times, he showed actual bits of character growth at important parts of the story. Randal, on the other hand, is so extremely unlikable, so completely detestable, that there is no greater joy the game gives the player than when he shuts his mouth for any length of time. It is a brief respite from his banality, because every single thing Randal says is so awful and unfunny that the only possible conclusion here is that the writers also actively hated the character of Randal and wanted to make sure everyone else did as well.

It isn't just Randal that is terrible, however, and there is not a single character in the entire game with one solitary redeeming feature. Almost every single interaction in the game goes on about twice as long as it needs to as the game fumbles around for a joke that neither character seems interested in telling. It is exhausting getting through a game with so many unlikeable characters, and MTV could put together a remake of Jersey Shore where the cast is composed entirely of convicted war criminals and it would still be preferable in comparison to what this game offers. It is apparent from the attempt at humour (and the cast) that Randal's Monday is trying to be a spiritual successor to Clerks, especially given all the hype surrounding the inclusion of Jason 'Jay from Jay & Silent Bob fame' Mewes. It comes close, but forgets the jokes, distinct style of comedy, likeable characters, decent script, and dialogue resembling something that an actual human being might say. Beyond that, though, it was pretty close.