Always Sometimes Monsters

I keep coming back to the moment early on where you realize the game is not going to reward you for being decent. You are broke, evicted, and on a 30-day clock to reach a wedding across the country before the love of your life says yes to someone else. That ticking calendar, and the constant low hum of an empty stomach, is the entire engine of Always Sometimes Monsters. Vagabond Dog made something that refuses to flatter you. The setup sounds like a road-trip romance, but what you actually get is closer to a survival-of-values simulation. The character creation is quietly radical: at a house party, you simply interact with guests naturally, and through those interactions the game infers your protagonist's gender, ethnicity, and love interest from a pool of combinations. From that point forward, NPCs react to who you are, not just what you say. Taking a factory job canning meat or sorting tofu, running errands for a medical marijuana co-op, or agreeing to make a sealed delivery for a stranger you just met - these are the textures of daily hustle here, not dragon slaying. The minigames that represent this labor are deliberately, almost aggressively dull, which is either inspired design or the most off-putting friction in the game depending on your tolerance for intentional tedium. Most critics landed somewhere in the middle on that argument. Where the game earns real respect is in how it handles NPC weight. Every conversation has the potential to send your story sideways. There are no flavor-text bystanders; the game quietly interrogates whether you are reading people correctly, and paranoia is a completely reasonable emotional response to carry through it. Getting drawn into the lives of others opens far more story than staying safe, and the moral geometry involved - working as a union scab to afford bus fare, facilitating a gambling addiction for rent money - lands without a preachy voiceover explaining what you should feel. The writing is uneven, sometimes tipping into fortune-cookie philosophizing, but when it connects it leaves a mark. The stamina mechanic, keeping your character just hungry enough to feel precarious, is a small masterstroke of tone. The honest caveats are real though. Branching paths sometimes lead to endings that feel thinner than the journey warranted, and certain emotional beats in the central love story are more constrained than the game's freewheeling premise implies. The pacing drags in patches, and a sequel - Sometimes Always Monsters - exists if you want to continue the story with an imported save. Neither game is technically ambitious; this is RPG Maker pixel art, earnest and functional rather than gorgeous. The soundtrack has been widely praised for doing heavy atmospheric lifting, and it genuinely does. It is the kind of score that makes a rainy city block feel like a philosophical weight. For the right player - someone who gravitates toward Cart Life, Papers Please, or Disco Elysium's grittier passages - this is a meaningful few evenings. It holds a 73 on Metacritic and sits at Mostly Positive on Steam, which feels accurate. Not everyone will find the deliberately uncomfortable pacing worth it. But for those of us who want a game to ask uncomfortable questions about who we become when our options run out, Vagabond Dog made something quietly essential here. Go in with patience and low expectations for traditional fun, and it will give you something stranger and more durable.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

Be the first to comment on Always Sometimes Monsters.