Always Sometimes Monsters - Now This Is Videogaming!

I've got this notion about video games as a medium. You see, every single artistic medium has something exclusive to it that makes it worthwhile and valuable. Writing allows you to create literally anything, film allows you an insane measure of fine control over the story you're putting out, music allows you to transmit emotion without the need of words or visuals, and so on. Obviously, what gaming has that no other medium has is interactivity. It allows for all types of interactions, be it simply expecting the player to guide their character through obstacles, or actually expecting them to choose who their character is and how they act. As such, the most accomplished and unique games are those that play to those precise strengths. The best games are those that either base themselves on strong, satisfying gameplay experiences or on storytelling that is very choice-based. As such, it is no surprise that my top 5 games of all time are all this way.

Always Sometimes Monsters is a game that is all about choices. Both at a mechanical and a story level, what defines Always Sometimes Monsters is its choice. In a way, Always Sometimes Monsters is truly unprecedented. It's the first game that I'd say is truly equivalent to a modern-day realistic drama. Whilst I love games like Persona 4 and  The Walking Dead to bits, they both rely on fantasy in their story and some very gamey elements in the gameplay. Persona 4 is still a JRPG with combat, and The Walking Dead still has big action setpieces and puzzle elements that are very traditionally gamey. Always Sometimes Monsters has none of this. It's firmly based in reality at all times in its aesthetic, and it revolves exclusively around walking around and talking to people, with very rare breaks for short minigames representing an action one would believably take in the real world.

In Always Sometimes Monsters you take the role of a once promising writer who's completely failed to deliver. Your landlord is cracking down on you and demanding rent money that you simply do not have. To make things worse, you receive an invitation to the love of your life's wedding at the other side of the country. It's happening in 30 days, and it's up to you to scrounge up enough money to keep hopping from town to town in hopes of making it in time.

Beyond that, almost literally anything is your choice. Are you male or female? Straight, gay, bi? Are you a good person? Do you think you're a good person? Are you going to the wedding to be there for someone you hold dear, or in hopes of gaining them back? Will you do honest odd jobs to get there, or try to profiteer off of those vulnerable enough? How good is your work ethic? Do you do drugs? What are your political leanings? What are your religious leanings? What do you like to eat?

This is just the very surface level of all the choices you get to make. The game is truly replete with choices, many of which are genuinely tough. You are strapped for cash, and you could make a lot of money by screwing people over. On the other hand, you can really screw people over. But then some of them deserve to be screwed over, don't they?

The amount of choices is truly staggering, and a good amount of them are tough. Some are very obviously telegraphed, others are not. It really does make the game feel alive and like a real place, even through a lot of the very weird (if, for me, effective) humor put in there.

The thing that the game does best, however, is that it never judges you for your choices. It simply presents you the consequences of said choices, and allows you to feel guilty or not, to try to justify your choice or not. Everything in this game is a choice, even things that aren't in the game itself.

All of this would fall over if the story the game told wasn't good. Luckily, the rather simple story is immensely effective. The structure the game ends up taking is as follows: You're in a town. You meet a few characters, with one of them allowing you to stay with them. You get given a goal you need to reach to get to the next town, and a lead as to how to accomplish said goal. You can choose to follow the lead, or find your own way. It's very effective, with each town feeling distinct, real, and interesting. There's also occasional flashbacks to your past, your relationship with the person to whose wedding you're heading. They're done genuinely well. The romance is believable, even if you only see select moments of it, and you can also see how it falls apart through some pretty heart-breaking scenes.

Always Sometimes Monsters is, to a very real degree, the simplest distillation of what a story-based game should be. This could not work as a movie, a book, a painting, or a piece of music. Always Sometimes Monsters is an experience and a story that works only in game form. It's about the decisions we have to make on a day-to-day basis, about how we make them, what they mean, and how they reflect on who we are. It's truly brilliant, and strongly recommended to all. It's pretty cheap on Steam, go get it.

Presentation: 9/10
The only thing that lets it down is some shaky art from time to time. Otherwise, it sounds brilliant, and its story is brilliantly told.

Gameplay: 9/10
Its gameplay is mainly its choices. There's no real flaw with its choices, but a lot of the minigames on the periphery are rather shaky.

Overall: 9.5/10
Brilliant. Go get it. I may not like it more than Persona 4 or The Walking Dead, but there's something here that I respect to the very deepest level. It's ballsy, clever, genuine, and full of charm.

A Zero Escape retrospective.

Before we begin with the spoiler-filled bit, here's a quick primer on the Zero Escape series for all of you who have not had the pleasure of playing them thus far. It's a series of visual novels with escape-the-room adventure elements, in which you and 8 other people are put in an almost, but not quite, SAW-style death game by a mysterious masked entity calling themselves Zero. So far, there's been two games in the series: 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors (Later re-released and rebranded as Zero Escape: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors) and Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward (Released in Japan under what I think is the much better name Zero Escape: Good People Die) They're shrouded in mystery and reveals, all stemming from one central question: why are you in this sadistic game? All the time there's new pieces added to the puzzle, and you keep uncovering answers that open up even more questions.

The games delight in two major things: long, very drawn out discussions on pseudo-science and messing with the barrier between player and game. Basically anything else would be a spoiler, but let it be said that I very much recommend both games, the first one in particular. They manage to strike a great balance between being unrelentingly silly and self-serious, taking these prolonged discussions about Ice 9, conspiracy theories about the Titanic and other such nonsense deadly serious. The result is a genuinely endearing product where it's surprisingly easy to get immersed in all these immensely silly topics. Yes, a lot of the conversations that go on are stupid, but the characters take them so completely serious, without a hint of irony, that you can't help but go with it and love every second of it. The writing is also completely solid: these writers know how to build a story.

The games are also genuinely great at messing with your expectations regarding the characters. A lot of the obvious archetypes you're presented with are subverted, inverted, or played with in a variety of fascinating ways. This is not to say characters act like real people. They're all surprisingly chill at being in death games, and seem to enjoy standing about and discussing the Ship of Theseus problem even when under a strict time limit with the threat of death. But this is taken so unblinkingly by the game that it's very easy to go along with, and doesn't as much bring you out of the action as create a weird dissonant tone that works pretty well with the fairly surreal events going on around you.

The final element is the choice-making. Both games have a variety of different routes that are very different in the events that take place, based entirely on your decisions. These are most often just based on what rooms you choose to go through throughout the game, though Virtue's Last Reward throws in an extra twist on top of this. I'll just say that the way the choices work is incredibly well done, in order to avoid spoilers by the way of specifics.

In short, they're both great (if immensely silly at times) visual novels. 999 is a bit more horror-ish in a way that I very much enjoy and, I personally thought, more clever with its twists, whilst Virtue's Last Reward is a deeper story with more strands to discover, and considerably better puzzle sections, as well as a massive quality of life improvement in the form of the flowchart that lets you instantly go to any decision point. They're both highly recommended, but start with 999. Not only do I like it more, but Virtue's Last Reward will make more sense (and have more intriguing mysteries) if you've played 999 first.

This is where I'm giving myself free reign to spoil things. I'm going to very directly compare both games, including major plot-points. These are games that you absolutely do not want spoiled: they rely very heavily on the mystery of the whole situation. Half the joy comes from those "Eureka!" moments when you figure out how a few weird plot strands connect. I doubt they'd stand up on a second play-through when you know everything. Seriously, leave now if you have the slightest intention to play these things, I'm going to very thoroughly spoil both games.

OK, are the unspoiled people gone now? I think they're gone. Good. Didn't like them anyway.

As I've mentioned previously in this little piece, I like 999 more than Virtue's Last Reward. There's a few reasons for this: I thought the version of the Nonary Game in 999 simply works a lot better than it does in Virtue's Last Reward. The bombs are a much better way to end people, I thought, since it really does make for some truly gruesome parts. Walking through the remnants of the Ninth Man in Room 5, or finding Not-Snake blown up in Room 3 were both really disgusting experiences, and the descriptions of both situations were on-point. It really helped the atmosphere become oppressive in a way that Virtue's Last Reward really never became.

Another such reason is Ace. I fucking love Ace. In 999, you're really led to believe Ace is the trustworthy one. He makes a selfless sacrifice (by taking a very risky move) for the group early on, he acts as the voice of reason in a lot of situations, trying to keep the team together, is kind and understanding, and a pleasure to talk to. Of course, Ace ends up being the one who's been killing off other members of the group to try and protect himself, with every good action he takes being a cover up for a crime, and is revealed to have been a completely evil motherfucker even before the events of the Nonary Game. If anything, he's more the true villain of 999 than even June (AKA Zero) is, since she's only really having to act this way because of what Ace did to her. It's an event that really hurts, and one that I really didn't see coming. He's a really brilliant villain.

Of course, I didn't expect Virtue's Last Reward to pull an Ace again. Playing the same trick twice would've been lame and predictable. I did keep an especially close eye on Luna, since she seemed to be nice enough - and a different enough flavor of nice at that - to be a serious candidate for "the Ace", but she turned out alright on the end. Instead we got Dio being the secretly evil one. Except... well, Dio acts like Santa from the first game. He's loud, brash, and makes it very clear that he's out to save his own skin first and foremost. It's not exactly a surprise when the one character who's openly unlikable and hostile turns out to be the villain. As for the other characters... Well, Luna's a robot, and that was a plot point that was kinda cool, I guess? Alice is a secret agent person... Clover's still Clover... Quark's just there to get ill a lot... K's your clone/son, but that's not actually plot relevant... Tenmyouji's actually Junpei from the first game, which is a really cool twist, but it's also more of a side thing than a proper plot twist... and Phi's really important to the plot, but there's no real twist to her story other than being an esper like you.

What I'm saying is that, whilst most of these characters are either very likable (Tenmyouji and Luna are the absolute best) or - usually - appropriately unlikable (fuck Dio, though I feel like I really shouldn't dislike Alice as much as I do), they're simply not played with the way the characters in the first game were. You're told information about who these people are. You discover the Tenmyouji's Junpei, or that Luna's a robot, but their personalities don't change. The first thing I remember about Clover in the first game isn't who she was (A girl from the first Nonary Game), but how she would change under pressure (Going chillingly ax-crazy when Snake disappeared). It's cool and all that Luna's a robot, and the Luna ending absolutely broke my little heart, but knowing that Luna's a robot doesn't really change my perception of the character all that much. It's not like discovering that Ace was actually completely terrible all along, or that Santa is actually like best, most devoted, brother ever to an actually pretty fucked up extent. It's an added character trait, not a complete surprise rewriting of the whole character.

And, the final thing to bring up before I starting heaping praise on Virtue's Last Reward (because that game deserves praise damnit) is the Twist. Not one of the twists, I'm talking capital-T Twist here. You've actually been playing as Akane on the bottom screen, not as Junpei on the top screen. Junpei's communicating his perceptions back in time to a person in the same game he is, 9 years ago, in order to save them, and all the timelines and choices you made happened and were simply different universes and versions of the Nonary Game Akane was exploring trying to survive. It's brilliant on a bunch of different levels. All your games that you re-loaded from? All canon and plot relevant. The character you thought you were playing? Not actually the character you were playing. Heck, you weren't playing the game you thought you were playing. It's genuinely clever, even if the in-universe explanation is silly in a very Zero Escape-y way.

In Virtue's Last Reward the equivalent Twist is that all the timelines you play are canon... and they're all plot relevant. That's it. It's not just a watered down version of the Twist from 999, it's actually just the twist from 999, with a bit of it removed. That's honestly just lame, and whilst this does make for a good mechanic both in terms of storytelling and gameplay I'm just kind of upset at it. I was hoping for another clever exploration of the divide between player and game, and we just get the exact same thing again. It's well done, but it's already been done by the only other game in the series, which just makes it be very limp.

And finally, I get to heap praise on Virtue's Last Reward. I'm not going to compare it as directly to 999 in praising it, but that's just because the only ways it disappointed me directly relate to it being a sequel to 999, and not doing as well as its predecessor in certain aspects. Taken as a standalone game it's very good, and the fields on which it expands on what 999 did are all very well done.

One thing I particularly enjoyed was the Ambidex Game. On a player level, it's a great and tense series of choices. Playing Prisonner's Dilemma with the other players of the Nonary Game is full of doubts and indecisions. I trust this person... but if they pick Betray I'll be in a bad spot, or they'll be in too good a spot. I should pick Betray to defend myself, but if they pick Ally I'll screw them over in a way I don't want to, and jeopardize the chances of people picking Ally against me in future rounds. Of course, you know you'll eventually go back and re-do the choice, but the first time through it's hard not to hesitate a lot before picking. Betraying someone who trusted you feels awful, and being betrayed by someone you trusted really makes you feel hurt, stupid, and worried about how behind you are in the Nonary Game.

It's also clever from a game design and writing perspective. It allows for clear and easy branch points without you having to design a whole new puzzle room around them, as well as helping subtly speak about how relationships are progressing within the group, by providing an easy representation of who trusts who. It gives you easy catalysts for conflict and/or trust, and it gives a nice and easy physical representation of the weird way you've decided to implement the Schrodinger's Cat Paradox into your story.

I also love love love the whole A-plot. Whilst I think the characters aren't as interesting as the previous games, having a lot less hidden dimensions, they're still a very different bunch of very distinct and well-defined personalities. They're great to interact with, and watch interact. Perhaps the biggest surprise was Sigma himself, who I found a surprising amount more likable than Junpei from the previous game (and he was a pretty good character in his own right!).

I really like the mystery. There's a phenomenon I've observed where everyone seems to think that the way they played through all the routes ended up being the best way to play through all the routes, with the information revealed in the best order. This really speaks to the quality of the writing. I'm no different: I started with the Magenta door plotlines, then went through Yellow and then through Cyan, and I thought the order the information was presented to me was brilliant. Magenta presents a mysterious series of murders that makes you paranoid about a killer, and it really gets you to suspect absolutely everyone, but in Yellow you discover that this is all because of the suicide-inducing effects of Radical-6. Then Cyan introduces an actual killer, but Yellow's managed to get your guard down. Dio's revealed early, which is good, since it would've been insulting to my intelligence to pretend he wasn't obviously evil any longer.

At any rate, it's a real pleasure going through all the paths, slowly collecting pieces of information and piecing the whole puzzle together. It's spread out just enough you really feel like you're doing detective work, but it's given to you at a regular enough basis that there's always something there for you to work on fitting into the puzzle, yet the puzzle's large enough that you won't be able to build it completely by yourself.

I liked the Twist - not the lame Twist about dimension hopping that we already did in 999 - but the whole "we're in the future, working on reverting the apocalypse and also Sigma's old" twist. It really fit all the pieces of the puzzle nicely into place, and was appropriately insane and silly. All the time we spent worrying about Radical-6, lunar eclipses, antimatter, cold sleep the Chinese room and the Turing test felt justified and tied together in a way so simple and elegant that I can't help but respect it.

Also I guess I liked the puzzle rooms more in Virtue's Last Reward, but I honestly don't care about those that much. I'm here for the story.

I'll bring this long, rambling, piece of writing to a quick and sudden end. I'm writing this early in the morning of June 25th, 2016. It's the day after the world found out the UK is going to leave the EU, two days after the Brexit referendum, an event that's probably going to be important for decades to come. I'm not going to bring my political views on this into this piece, - they have no place on a videogame blog, and I'm not good enough at talking politics - but I thought it was important that I don't allow myself to be wrapped up in looking at and thinking about just the big stuff. I've got to keep the small stuff, like these obscure visual novels from Japan, in view. After all, it's this type of small, oddly specific, stuff that I enjoy most in life. Zero Escape III: Zero Time Dilemma, the final game in the series, is coming out in three days. I only finished Virtue's Last Reward a couple days ago, and I'm incredibly excited for Zero Time Dilemma. The Zero Escape series is one I really do love, from the bottom of my heart. I wanted to praise it, criticize it, and leave this article confident that, whilst I recognize these games have flaws, I have a good reason for loving them as much as I do.

I'm now pretty sure that I do. Now to kill time for three days until I can get my hands on a copy of the next in the rambling about pseudo-science whilst in a death game simulators that I love so much. I really can't wait.

As Zero III would say, have a nice traitor!