Randal's Monday Review (PC)

I jumped (twitched) at the chance to review “Randal”s Monday”. I love point & click adventure games and I love the cartoon style it uses. I have more than a soft spot for “Clerks”, plus protagonist Randal is voiced by, you guessed it, Jeff Anderson who plays Randal in the aforementioned cult film.

Now, you and I both know that when you start up a point & click there”s going to be lots of dialogue and lots of obtuse puzzles. It”s par for the course and for some reason what our rosy memories of this genre are based on. I just wasn”t expecting the vast, never-ending dialogue or the sheer fuckwittery of pretty much all of the puzzles that this title delivers.

It all starts out wonderfully. Randal and his chums are sat in a bar discussing his best friend”s forthcoming engagement celebrations. The dialogue is funny if slightly dark-humoured and stylistically, the game resembles adult cartoons (not *that* kind of adult cartoon).

From there on in, Nexus Game Studio pretty much scarfs down popular culture references, liberally vomits them up in to every single screen and then rubs your face in it. In fairness, it”s entertaining for about an hour and then it just grates. It”s almost as if the developers weren”t confident enough in their own intellectual property that they had to go and borrow from pretty much every happy memory we might have had casino online of entertainment past.

In between this shameless force-feeding, a reasonably interesting, but yet again borrowed, story unfolds. Your protagonist has stolen a ring with a curse. Randal is doomed to repeat Monday, and all the actions he performs effect the wibblywobblytimeywimeyness of the world as he sets off on an adventure to fix it all, armed with pretty much just his massive array of withering put-downs and abuse. Again, these are funny at first but there”s only so much you can take, especially when the majority of the supporting characters come armed with their own brand of sarcastic banter.

Pretty much the only thing that”s not entertaining from the outset are the puzzles. Handy loading screen prompts suggest that you just need to use a bit of logic. I dispute this, there is for example, no logic in trying to hunt through every single location to find ingredients to put in a cocktail for a priest. That”s much more of a “just try every possible combination” and it”s not fun, at all.

Dialogue can be endless with no clue as to what might be actually useful and what”s just story filler. The most annoying facet of this is that you”ll choose your response, having read through the selection available, and then Randal will trot out the entire thing again making conversations last twice as long as they need to.

In the end I managed to play through twelve hours of this and that”s more than enough for anyone. There are a few chuckles to be had but I can”t help thinking that the developers could have done so much more than just re-create what made this genre a bit crap the first time around and then cram a load of popular stuff on top for good measure.