Sometimes Always Monsters

[b]Content Warning[/b]: sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, and general human trash behavior [b]Important Note[/b]: This is a direct sequel to Always Sometimes Monsters. Without having played that first, you won’t understand any of the context of Sometimes Always Monsters. This game is very different from the first one. In ASM, the player could accomplish things in different ways and affect the outcome of events. However, in SAM, the story is very linear and the choices you make don’t impact the outcomes much. I’m not going to lie, that’s disappointing, but I still found the game fun and entertaining. The protagonist goes on a book tour to promote their newest book (which they’re still writing) along with other authors. Drama ensues. Weird sh*t ensues. The ending is what can be influenced the most out of the player’s choices. [u]Info[/u] • You don’t need your ASM save file for story continuation, as there’s a questionnaire to answer about what happened in the previous game. Actually, I find it more interesting to answer questions differently in the questionnaire to experience other things in SAM. • Mini-games aren’t necessary to advance the story. However, there are two achievements related to doing certain things with mini-games. [u]Praises[/u] • Meaningful, interesting dialogue between the author characters. • Encourages empathy through the discussion of other POVs. • Demonstrates the struggles of artists in general, not just writers. • The player can choose for the protagonist and/or their wife to be transgender. • Excellent racial diversity and narratives on racism/xenophobia. • Mockery of homophobia throughout the game. • Crude, outlandish humor. • You can save/adopt a stray dog. All dogs in the game can be petted. • DLC allows the player to change the author characters’ clothes on their portraits and sprites. My favorite is the sakura outfit for Yasi; so cute. [u]Complaints[/u] • Controller issues. I used a PS4 controller and sometimes – usually during mini-games – it could become unresponsive. (Reported to dev. Dev said they’d fix it.) • Item inconsistencies. Sometimes items will randomly disappear from inventory. Sometimes the dialogue suggests something was taken from the inventory, but it’ll still be there after. • Scripting issues. (But they’re working on that according to the dev’s Discord.) • Dialogue about cops suggests they’re trustworthy. I know this story probably takes place in Canada (as the devs are Canadian), but here in the US, you don’t call the cops unless it is [i]dire[/i], because our cops don’t know how to not be fascist a$$holes. If you call the cops on a black person, they are very likely to be brutalized or even killed. So, uh, no, f*ck the police. ACAB. • One of the author characters wrote about the killing of a capybara. Not cool, man. Capybaras are the greatest rodents on the planet. The author character should’ve wrote about her character befriending the capybara as an animal companion or some sh*t. Y u do dis? • Several typos. It's not as good as the first game, but I still liked it. I recommend it to those who enjoyed ASM, but can handle this game not being a duplication of that gameplay.

Honestly this game commits one of the worst crimes a piece of media can fall into in my opinion: It's boring. Atrociously boring. Most of the content of the game you are sitting on a bus and then click to write pages to complete a manuscript. The bus will take you to different locations but they felt overwhelmingly empty with very little to do. There are usually 4 dialogue options calling along the lines of "Yes" "No" "I Don't Know" "I Don't Care" This makes your character, that had such a rich personality in the previous game, seem dull and uninteresting. Overall most of the characters were uninteresting and were honestly kind of offensive. It seemed like every character fell into a racial stereotype, but maybe I'm alone in noticing that. The Asian man is addicted to hentai and is all facts no feelings, the Latina girl grew up in a family of 12 with no personal space, the Muslim girl only thinks about her religion and has never fallen in love. I don't accidentally wrote them into stereotypes. What's crazy though is that all of the characters, stereotypes and all, are also boring. You go out on day trips with the other authors at some points. Mostly it just involves going to a place, clicking on somethings, talking a bit, and then time passes. The exception to this that I got is the fake D&D session which seemed like it was going to be super fun, until they didn't let you actually do anything it was just reading more dialogue and watching things happen to you character without any of your control. Speaking of boring; besides doing basic chores for most of the game like, cooking in a simple "input ingredients" task, taking your laundry to the laundromat, buying groceries, and brushing your teeth. (Other than these task there is barely a game.) The dialogue you are forced to sit through is atrocious. I know its a book tour, but I didn't expect the game to force me to sit through fake book readings. Listen, whoever wrote them is talented, but I didn't buy this game to read an entire paragraph or two of a fake book I bought the game to play a game. There is a climax at the end which in my opinion had very little build up. You're supposed to have a rival but overall she had very little effect on the game outside of 1 scene and people mentioning her in like 2-3. There is no way, that I found at least, to really investigate or do anything about this plot line. You just have to really let everything happen to you which, in a video game is abysmal writing especially when they say in the summary "you control the narrative." Overall I finished the game in just 5 hours which was disappointing. I loved the predecessor and have played it multiple times, but I could not in good faith advise anyone to buy this game.

Story is kind of meh. There's not a whole lot to do between some story events and not much point in doing much of anything you're not really given much direction and I ended up spending most of the time writing more of my novel which is just pick a title for chapter then skip ahead time. A sequel could have been done far better but it's so hard to get through this game cause it just feels like a chore to play with and there's not much interesting in the game. it lacks a lot of anything like story, gameplay, substance. It's painful to play through because it just doesn't give you reason to keep playing. The original game had far more to it while this one just is meh.

Sometimes Always Monsters feels like an experiment going full steam ahead with a tossed out concept, in this case “what if we had an entire game where the player could turn down everything and wasn’t railroaded” with very little done to make that concept fun. A game where nothing can be essential because everything has to be able to be said “no” to is one where not much of anything leaves an impression because every interaction with the game’s cast, the events in a given town the player visits, and dialogue option is stripped down to extreme “yes, no, I don’t know” binaries and even then most of the time the yes option for a given event is phrased as a noncommittal “Yeah, maybe” or “I think so.” Everything throughout SAM’s journey feels guarded from any stakes or investment, even when the player is in a given city you can do little with the stacked cast of supporting characters other than take them to eat burgers at the same fast food chain and repeat the literal same conversation every time just with names of the characters being discussed swapped. Life simulation is a major aspect of SAM, there’s fitness, cleanliness, thirst, and hunger to “consider,” which is a word used as light as can be as fitness and cleanliness are essentially there for flavor text interactions, and unlike this game’s predecessor, the main hunger meter isn’t displayed anymore so knowing when to eat and drink involves waiting until the game decides to block you from an activity with a message saying the protagonist is starving. It’s pure tedium, and it’s baffling so much time and effort clearly went into making a system for cooking different recipes of food and dozens of different food/drink items to buy at stores when it just plain doesn’t matter mechanically for doing anything other than hitting the bare minimum of food needed to do activities. Activities that don’t even matter either. Why can I invest at an accounting firm when none of that money ever comes into play? Why should I take the other characters out on gatherings when I ignored one the entire game not talking to her once outside of scripted moments and at the end she called me her new family? Why do I have a phone with a calling system when the characters either don’t ever answer or repeat the same canned dialogue whenever they do answer? Why can I write chapter titles for the book the plot hinges when I don’t even know what the book’s about? Sometimes Always Monsters was a disappointing experience of a deluge of shallow events and minigames thrown at you with no incentive to do so. The most interesting moments of the game were the times that the story betrayed its premise and made me have to decide and deal with consequences of decisions rather than just being able to toss them off with a “No.” I can absolutely appreciate the work the developers put into responding to feedback from the initial release and making the game more accessible and less tedious, but the bandaids of adding in things to ease the life sim system, more events, etc. does nothing to address the fundamental issue that those systems and events aren’t fun in the first place.

This could've been a decent game if it wasn't taken so seriously. The story was trying to be complex and twisty, there was drama and politics that nobody was asking for. I felt like I was wasting time watching a reality show. Every town was essentially the same, and the conversations between characters weren't interesting. And the devs of the game kept making appearance, talking about their work and how brave and important it is to be an indie developer and surviving on coffee. This game should've been 3-4 hours tops. All endings sucked, in fact the endings don't even end. The routine just keeps playing out whether you got the "good" or the "bad" ending. And what do you learn from the game? That we're all monsters in a way? Didn't need to be that long to get that point across, imho.

As a sequel, i didn't like the choice of having us play as sam (depending on how we ended ASM ofc). The storyline was not very interesting. The interaction with other characters was extremely bland and just felt incomplete. Also so many bugs related to dialogue - e.g. crashing every time I interacted with a certain character in a specific spot; dialogue repetition; bad interaction with menu items. Finished it feeling like i had wasted my time tbh

As many people i spent years waiting for this game, and after playing it i feel disappointed. Ill keep my review short, i don't feel like this game has any replay ability and it feels way more linear than the previous game. I wasn't really invested in any of the new characters and the story was also really lacking. I don't think i would consider playing another game in this franchise if one was announced.

I wish I could give a positive review on this game, knowing how dedicated the developers have been to update and fix this game. But no, these bug fix and content updates do not save this game. Because the backbone of this game is flawed. As someone who likes Always Sometimes Monsters a lot, the story of this sequel is quite disappointing. First, the ending makes little sense. Sam obviously hates you as ♥♥♥♥, but [spoiler] they can be gone simply because you write "Sam leaves" in the final duel [/spoiler] . Second, the choices you make in this game do not compare to the ones in ASM. In ASM, you often make choices that have big consequences, and your interests often conflict with others. However, in SAM, you mostly make trivial choices, such as what meals you need to make and whether to go to the gym. These two flaws make this game a real disappointment as an ASM's sequel. Perhaps, as a stand alone game, SAM will be a fun game. I can see its potential. But it also has some minor but annoying mechanics. For example, not having a stamina bar like the one in ASM to show how hungry your character is. And if the four authors you choose all have their events in the latter half of the cities, you will end up being rather bored in the former half of the cities, but rather busy in the remaining cities. Overall, I agree with another review which states the devs should abandon this sinking ship and invest their talent and hard work on a new game.

Have been replaying this lately, and I'm very impressed at the extent to which it has improved since it was conceived. I understand this distance because I was there. This game will never win the 'Labor of Love' award on Steam dot com, but it is the real thing.

Importé mi final "malo" de Always Sometimes Monsters para sacar un final "malo" en este también, 10/10 muy satisfecho, espero rejugarlos pronto y quizás, quizás hacer las cosas mejor esta vez, pero no prometo nada ;)