REVIEW UPDATED: 10/04/2020

Oh, how I was looking forward to this. Or perhaps, given that this is my updated review I should note: Oh, how I hoped I was wrong.

Sometimes Always Monsters is the anticipated sequel to 2014's indie RPG Always Sometimes Monsters. Always Sometimes Monsters - henceforth, ASM - was one of my favorite indie games of its time, combining a simple hook (it's an RPG where you travel across the country to win back the love of your life!) with some solid writing and genuinely interesting usage of choice branching and continuity. It wasn't perfect but it was really, really good. When it landed, it landed hard. So, when the sequel was announced, I was immediately hooked.

And then it entered production hell. For whatever reason, SAM was delayed extensively. Around the time I had accepted it was abandoned to development hell, I found out that a release date had come out of the blue! Well, I figured, I guess miracles do still happen!

Unfortunately, the game we've received is just a warning to all developers with big dreams to not let your reach exceed your grasp.

First things first, I feel I should credit the SAM team with two things. The energy and dedication with which they've been responding to feedback, both in fixing bugs and adjusting things that were unclear. Secondly, the fact that they attempted to shoot for the stars in the first place - one could say that it's the purpose of art.

However, I fear no one during development asked 'is this fun?'

SAM has a really impressive scope, and it's probably unprecedented for a game of this type. However, this scope is hamstrung by the fact that very little guidance is offered to the player. It's unfortunate because ASM had a simple hook (reunite with the love of your life) with a simple goal (before the wedding in thirty days) and a simple gameplay loop (acquire funds by making moral or ethical decisions.)

Meanwhile, SAM isn't nearly as clear. For most of it, you're travelling on a book tour. For the most part, this book tour consists of wandering from location to location, listening to people talk with very little context to any of it. The player character generally only gets to respond with yes/no/I don't know. In contrast to ASM, we don't even see what the player character says, which erodes a lot of their personality and my personal connection to them. Part of why I found ASM so effective was how I felt as if the protagonist mirrored me - I can't say the same for my time with SAM.

The book tour is an interesting premise. Okay, so, you're on it - now what? Well, you spend two days in a given down then one of the other people on your bus gives a reading of their book and then you're back on the bus to go to the next town on the list. You don't get much guidance within these towns. When my SO says they want to get off the bus and do something because they're going stir crazy, I was unable to find something that satisfied them. Other writers on the bus will ask to party up but there's no explanation as to why I should do this - are these characters my friends, will their opinion of me matter? Nothing is explained and I don't know what to expect.

This extends to the wider 'rules of the game.' For example, each day appears to be split into two or three periods. If I work on the novel, I know that takes up a big chunk of time - maybe the whole day. But do other things, such as washing clothes or doing the dishes, also take up time? If so, how much? With the novel I need to write before the end of the tour, how many chapters do I need to write to make it complete? Do the fitness and hygiene statistics really mean anything? ASM was really good about this, so, it's very disappointing that SAM is so opaque.

In general, the gameplay is tedious and the game itself is short. With seven hours, I've done one full playthrough and two that're approximately half. Most of the time was spent battling with the life sim elements - cooking food, washing clothes, going to the bathroom. I dread to think how the gameplay time would look without those elements. I'm not sure what these elements add to anything and they appear to just be a series of roadbumps to pad the game time out. At the very least, the game should make it much easier to monitor the various statistics that serve to interrupt getting on with the game.

I feel like the intent may have been for a bit of tedium. Life's not always exciting, right? Then I'll just point to a quote from T Bone Burnett: "Even if a song is supposed to be bad in a film, it still has to be great. Because if you put bad music in a film, it's just bad -- then the film's bad. You can put good music in a film and say it's bad and the audience will believe it's bad, but it will still be good and they will still be entertained by it, even though they're told it's bad."

'Even if a mechanic is supposed to be boring in a game, it still has to be fun. Because if you put a bad mechanic in a game, it's just bad - then the game's bad.'

Perhaps more unfortunate is that SAM's story is threadbare at best. The premise is interesting and the story itself flirts with a lot of interesting ideas, but the story is so short and the telling so thin that none of it is explored to any level that is remotely satisfying. Some of the vignettes that depict interactions between other authors on the tour are pretty good, but they're just cutscenes and have no impact on your interactions with them moving forward. The story feels like it consists of three main beats and a whole lot of filler. However, the new additions do make the story much clearer and more palatable, although it's still not ideal and still is based on the assumption that you're playing Sam as the author.

The other characters aren't that interesting and you never develop much of a relationship with any of them. They sit around on the bus until it's time for their one side quest, which you can choose to ignore, and then they go back on the bus. No matter the time of day, there they are, just sitting there.

The ending was... Well, it has a very interesting mechanic in it. But getting there feels contrived and some of the ending results feel about the same. For example, an ending where the rival shoots themselves because they're delusional. Even though he dies with the gun in his hand and a pair of witnesses, the protagonist is sent to jail because... Well, we don't know why. It just happens.

While the game appears way less buggy than at the time of my original review, I noticed grammatical and spelling errors, such as a remarkably consistent and amateur-level grammatical error during the reading of Ruth's book.

The music is good, the updated graphics are wonderful - although some of the portraits feel like they have scale issues. Heads too big for bodies, limbs too long or too thin. My particular character's portrait bothered me if only because he seemed to go from a surly Latino in ASM to a boy-ish white guy in SAM. All the other portraits basically match perfectly, though.

All in all, it's just very disappointing. I have a clearer picture of the game now but all it's really done is make it clearer the actual problems with it. I still can't recommend SAM as it stands, although this version of the review is technically less of a 'not recommend' than the other. SAM needed more depth and less breadth. It stands as a warning to complexity over simplicity. It needed someone standing over the shoulders of the developers and asking 'Is this fun? Is this interesting? Does this make sense?' And, perhaps most of all, 'Is this worth asking $30 for?'