Randal’s Monday is an adventure game recently released on PlayStation 4. It takes cues from the old-school point and click games while also adding many modern gameplay mechanics to give us the best of both worlds. If before continuing reading this review you want to read more about how the game was made, you can check out our interview with two of the developers by clicking right here.

 

Randal’s Monday is the story of Randal, a sociopath/kleptomaniac who, for some reason, ends up stuck in an endless loop, Groundhog Day style. To make things worse, the day he ends up repeating over and over is a Monday, and this is where the game gets its name from. We all hate Mondays, so we can instantly relate to what Randal is about to experience.

At the start of the game, you can select between the old-school control type and the modern control type. Basically, it all comes down to having to press a button more than once to activate an action – old-school is, well, old-school point and click while modern is a mix of the old, the new, the borrowed and the blue.

Once the game starts, you’ll get to learn the basics during its prologue and the start of Day 1, being able to select from many dialog options, tapping on items to collect them, trying to combine items to see if it sometimes works, and more. For example, in Randal’s apartment, you can grab a broom from the living room and a duck-hanger (a hanger with a duck) and combine them to create an extendible duck-hanger, as well as some leftover wire. This new item is required to lower a ladder that will allow you to escape from your apartment by going down to the alley. This is just a taste of the type of puzzles you’ll find in your quest.

The game features a very dark humor and a ton of references and nods to many video games, movies, TV shows, and more. Randal’s Monday is fully voice acted, and this helps to bring all characters to life, from Randal himself to all the NPC you’ll miss during your adventure.

If you don’t know what you can,/can’t interact with, then you can press the square button to display icons on the screen for everything you can activate with your cursor, and that makes it easier to check out every single thing for each section. But if you’re stuck and can’t find the solution to a puzzle, you can activate the hint system to learn more about what needs to be done. But before you do this, please take into consideration that if you use the hint system you’ll be locked out of a trophy (as has been the case for other adventure games on PlayStation 4), so unless you want to do a second speedrun of Randal’s Monday to get any trophies you might have missed the first time, stay away from the hint system!

Your total time with the game will depend on your experience with adventure releases, as well as with how many items you interact with and how many locations you explore. If you go for only story-related interactions and are awesome at the puzzles, you could complete the game in around 8-10 hours or so. But completing the game and getting all the trophies is a different thing, and that could end up adding another 4-5 hours to your total – and if you miss any trophies there is no chapter select, so you have to start over the whole game for another go.

Unfortunately, there is no Platinum trophy for Randal’s Monday which sucks because it’s a very fun game with lots to do, so the possibility for it to include a full trophy count is definitely there. Something else did want to mention before I forget, is that the game does not autosave your progress, so you have to manually save your game as you go. I’d also recommend that you keep multiple saves (at least one for each of the “days” in the game), just in case you end up screwing up a trophy – it’s always less time consuming to use a previous save from a day where a particular trophy can be unlocked than having to replay the whole game (the only exception being activating the hint system, because if you do that, you pretty much have to replay the whole game from a moment before you activated it).

[review pros=”Fun adventure game.
Great mix of old-school elements and 21st-century mechanics.
Lots of content” cons=”Humor might not be for everyone.” score=84]

Disclaimer
This review is based on a copy of Randal’s Monday provided by Nexus Game Studio Inc.