Your pockets are empty. Your career is in ruins. The eviction notice is on the door. And the person you were supposed to spend your life with is marrying someone else on the other side of the country, in less than a month.
That is the setup for Always Sometimes Monsters, the 2014 role-playing game from the Canadian studio Vagabond Dog, published by Devolver Digital. You play an author. You have 30 in-game days to get from the east coast to the west coast and interrupt a wedding. It is a small, ugly, honest game about being broke.
Always Sometimes Monsters scores 8.1 out of 10.
Trailer, via DevolverDigital.
An author, an eviction, and 30 days
The game opens with a narrative sequence that lets you build your character and your love interest. The relationship can be straight or gay, depending on what you choose.
Then the story starts, told through text windows supported by character portraits. You are an author who has ruined a career. You are being evicted from an apartment on the east coast. The love of your life is marrying someone else, across the country, within a month. So you make a last-ditch effort to salvage your world.
Vagabond Dog does not soften any of this. The premise is not a joke and the game never treats it as one. Your character is not a hero with a sword. Your character is a person with no money and a deadline.
Odd jobs, low pay, and a clock that keeps moving
The core loop of Always Sometimes Monsters is money. You need it to move to the next location. You get it by working.
Players walk around city environments, interact with NPCs, and find the means to earn cash. That usually means repetitive odd jobs for low pay. It can also mean compromising your idea of morality. The game is explicit that these are the two doors in front of you, and it does not pretend one of them is clean.
Time is the second pressure. The game runs across 30 in-game days. Each day moves through morning, day, and night as activities and events are completed. Choosing how to spend your time is a key component of the journey, because some options disable others.
That last detail is the whole design. You cannot do everything. You cannot be everyone’s friend and also make your bus. You cannot take the honest shift and also take the other thing. The game is not asking whether you are good. It is asking what you do when the clock will not stop.
The schedule does not wait for you
The 30-day structure is the spine of the game. The source lays out the frame: a month, three phases of each day, and a west-coast wedding at the end of it.
| Element | What the game gives you |
|---|---|
| Total span | 30 in-game days |
| Daily cycle | Morning, day, night |
| Progression | Time advances as activities and events are completed |
| Constraint | Some options disable others |
| Goal | Reach the west coast before the wedding |
Read that table again. There is no row for rest. There is no row for turning back. The calendar is the antagonist.
The choices are not binary, and that is the point
Vagabond Dog built Always Sometimes Monsters around decisions that alter the course of your journey and change the fate of your character. Those decisions affect the characters you meet and the world around them. The studio’s own framing is blunt: few things are ever as binary as right and wrong.
That is not a marketing line. It is the actual mechanic. Your story gets shaped by your personal ethical compass, and the game says outright that there is none other like it. That claim is usually a warning sign. Here it mostly holds.
The reason it holds is that the game refuses to grade you. It does not flash a morality meter. It does not tell you which door was correct. It lets you make the call and then it lets the call sit there.
Text windows, portraits, and a bird’s-eye view
Always Sometimes Monsters is a role-playing game, a simulator, an adventure, and an indie, and it wears all four labels without much strain. It is single player. It is played from a third-person, bird’s-eye or isometric perspective. The narrative arrives through text windows and character portraits.
That presentation is spare, and it is the right call. A game about a person with no money does not need a cinematic camera. It needs you looking down at a small figure walking through a city, deciding whether to take the shift.
The genre list matters less than the theme list, which is one word: drama. That is what this is. A drama about an author, an eviction, a wedding, and 30 days.
Where it lands on the platforms
Always Sometimes Monsters launched in 2014 for Microsoft Windows. A later update using the MonoGame framework brought it to OS X and Linux on 8 January 2015, then to iOS and Android on 28 May 2015, and to PlayStation 4 on 10 October 2017. After Vagabond Dog acquired the publishing rights to the game, a port to the Nintendo Switch was released.
That is a long tail for a small game, and it is a telling one. The platforms it reached — PlayStation 4, Linux, Android, PC, iOS, Mac, Nintendo Switch — are the platforms where a quiet, text-heavy RPG can actually find people. This is not a game that needed a big box. It needed a screen and a spare hour.
The published critical score sits at 8.1 out of 10, drawn from an aggregate of five outlets.
What actually matters here
The travel is the game. Not the wedding.
That is the part worth arguing about, so let us argue it. The premise of Always Sometimes Monsters is a rom-com engine: cross the country, stop the wedding, win the girl or the guy. If Vagabond Dog had built the game around that engine, it would be forgettable. The wedding is a destination, and destinations are cheap.
What the studio built instead is a game about the cost of getting anywhere. The odd jobs are repetitive and the pay is low on purpose. The 30-day clock is not a timer bolted onto a story. It is the story. Every morning you spend is a morning you cannot spend somewhere else, and the game makes you feel that in the most mundane way possible: by making you choose between two things you need and only getting one.
The morality system is where the game is most convincing and most frustrating. Vagabond Dog says few things are ever as binary as right and wrong, and the game means it. But refusing to grade a choice is not the same as refusing to judge it. The choices in Always Sometimes Monsters do change the fate of your character and the people you meet. What the game withholds is the verdict. It hands you the consequences and then it walks away.
That is a harder trick than it sounds. A lot of RPGs give you a dialogue wheel and a colored bar. This one gives you a bus ticket and a bad week.
The weak spot is the repetition. Odd jobs for low pay is the correct design, but correct design and fun are not the same thing. There are stretches where the game asks you to grind through the same kind of work to afford the same kind of progress, and the drama thins out. The text windows carry the weight, and when the writing is doing the work, the game sings. When it is not, you are just a small figure walking to another shift.
Still, the shape holds. Always Sometimes Monsters is a game about an author with nothing left, trying to get somewhere before it is too late, and the game makes you play the nothing. It is not a power fantasy. It is a budget.
The title asks the question directly: in the end, aren’t we always sometimes monsters? The game does not answer it. It makes you answer it, 30 times, one morning at a time.
Always Sometimes Monsters is available on PlayStation 4, Linux, Android, PC, iOS, Mac, and Nintendo Switch. It scores 8.1 out of 10.
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