Randal's Monday

I went into Randal's Monday already partial to its DNA: a Spanish indie debut, a point-and-click adventure wearing its LucasArts love on its sleeve, voiced by Jeff Anderson (yes, Randal from Clerks) with Jason Mewes along for the ride. That pedigree creates real warmth in the first couple of hours, and I want to be honest about that before I get into the complications. The setup is genuinely clever. Randal steals his best friend Matt's engagement ring after a night of heavy drinking, inadvertently triggering a cursed time loop that traps him reliving the same Monday over and over - each iteration carrying the consequences of the last, with reality quietly rewriting itself around his mistakes. The loop mechanic has a twist most Groundhog Day-style stories miss: actions persist between cycles, meaning a koala infestation you cause on Monday three is just waiting for you on Monday four. That accumulating absurdity is where the game's heart lives, and the cartoony art style, bold and sitcom-warm, suits it perfectly. Dialogue is color-coded in the classic SCUMM style, fourth-wall breaks let Randal fire the player mid-conversation, and the references come fast: Portal, Blade Runner, Back to the Future, The Twilight Zone, Fraggle Rock, and several dozen more crammed into every corner of a subway-connected city you can fast-travel across without load screens. Here is where I have to put on the honest hat. The puzzle design is the game's most serious liability, and reviewers across the board flagged it at launch. We are talking moon logic of a particular vintage - the kind where bypassing a lock requires extracting a spring from a broken radio, flattening it with a hammer, then combining it with wire cut from a coat hanger fed through a blender. The solutions are not "lateral thinking"; they are guesswork dressed up as creativity. The built-in hint system exists precisely because the developers knew players would stall, but consulting it too often makes the whole adventure feel like a guided tour rather than a puzzle game. The inventory UI, presented as a comic book panel that must be opened and closed every single time an item is used, compounds the friction in ways that feel like they survived from 1994 without irony. At ten to fifteen hours depending on how liberally you use hints, the runtime also outstays its welcome in the back half, where pacing loosens and backtracking across familiar locations starts to wear. The writing itself sits in an interesting middle ground. Randal as a character works - he is reliably awful without crossing into genuinely intolerable, and his growing, reluctant investment in fixing his mess gives the story a small but real arc. The supporting cast is thinner: most NPCs are functional stereotypes, and the density of pop culture references eventually creates a kind of static. When everything is a winking nod to something else, nothing lands with particular weight, and the game risks becoming a scrapbook of other people's ideas rather than its own thing. The soundtrack is minimal and functional rather than memorable - short looping tracks that stay out of the way of the voice acting, which is the right call given how dialogue-heavy the experience is. For the right player - someone with genuine affection for late-era LucasArts, a tolerance for obtuse puzzles, and a fondness for Clerks-adjacent humor - Randal's Monday delivers a particular kind of comfort. It is scrappy, handmade, and clearly built by people who cared. Nexus Game Studios poured over four years into this debut, and that investment shows in the specificity of the references and the consistency of Randal's voice. But caring is not the same as polishing, and the puzzle frustrations are real enough that casual adventure fans should approach with caution and a walkthrough tab open.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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