Randal's Monday

A must have for fans of the old Lucasarts adventure games, but also a great offer for people who are new to the genre.

It lives by the rules of the classic graphic adventure, which is great for those who enjoy the good old games of the genre, even though that also means that some aspects of the game might be consider negative by those who prefer newer adventures. Still, a great game.

Just like to asking Kevin Smith and at the same time Silent Bob to come with an idea for a graphic adventure, Randal's Monday is a visual, written and playable exercise of total Geekness. Completely reverential to all comics, films, series and games from the 80s to these days, this little indie Spanish graphic adventure could be considered as an spiritual game from the Clerks' crew. It is long, and with some puzzles where we have to use the Monkey Island kind of logic, but as funny and irreverent as South Park, and nerdy as a Comic-Con convention where Bill Murray has to live the same day again and again.

When it comes to the fundamental elements that make up a point-and-click adventure, Randal’s Monday gets a lot right, but also makes some disappointing mistakes. Fans of Kevin Smith or of comedy adventures will want to at least give this one a shot, but make sure to have a walkthrough on standby – I assure you, you will need it.

Randal's Monday had the potential to be a really great adventure. The plot is interesting enough and tickles the curiosity of the player to see how the story ends, but the game suffers from many exaggerated puzzles and some tiresome dialogues.

Randal’s Monday features a ton of content and a decent amount of play time. Not to mention it’s unique and fun.

Full of pop culture references and with tons of humour, Randal's Monday takes the concept of Groundhog Day and turns it into a quite enjoyable point and click adventure game.

There is a certain lack of comfort playing it and moving around its interface, as well as having a character that does not sit well at first, but Randal’s Monday hides good ideas and it’s a great tribute to a childhood full of nerdy books, movies, comics and videogames.

Whenever Randal’s Monday stops pretending to be a classic adventure and forgoes tedious puzzles like "find the hidden switch," it turns into a vicious manifesto that mercilessly tears apart geek-culture. [Feb 2015]

Randal's Monday is an "extreme" adventure, which stresses to capacity every typical characteristic of the genre, resulting in an original product, nonetheless difficult to digest.

The Nexus Game Studios’ debut title is a point&click adventure literally split in two. Funny, irreverent and full of hilarious homages to the nerd-geek culture, but also full of puzzles and riddles that lack in logic and meaning.

Quite entertaining comedy adventure that builds on a “Groundhog Day”-theme, but keeps getting lost in illogical and strangely connected puzzles.

The concept and writing will draw you in, while at the same time the ridiculous puzzle design pushes you away.

An entertaining comedy adventure, but too many of the puzzles in Randal's Monday are too far from even its own internal comic logic to really make sense. It's a fun ride, but it's also liable to frustrate if you refuse to use any outside help to solve this time-travelling puzzler.

Randal’s Monday doesn’t do everything right, but the things it does do right are daring, and in a genre that’s been lost to the ether for years, that’s definitely something.

Randal’s Monday gets so much right it’s depressing that it gets the crucial gameplay part wrong.

Fans of old adventure titles, crude humor and excessive pop culture references might find some value here, but most would be better served with better adventure games.

At best, Randal's Monday has puzzles that professors at the Institute of Moon Logic would point to and ask "What the hell?" They're nonsensical, poorly explained, reliant on the most painful 'try everything on everything' guesswork, and feel longer than being strapped to a board until Stephen Hawking's voice synthesiser has read out the entire works of Dostoyevsky.

If it's meant to be played for laughs, the joke falls flat with repetition. [Issue#157, p.125]

Like most Mondays, Randal’s Monday is too long and tedious; it has its moments but falls way short of being a cheeky entertainer with engaging gameplay.

However, everything about Randal's Monday has been a disappointment and I can't really recommend the game to anyone. Maybe Randal should have just slept through Monday.

Randal’s Monday is so packed with references to movies, books and other games that it’s bursting at the seams, but it never rises to the level of the works it mocks. [01/2015, p.77]

Randal’s Monday has a clever premise that deserves better treatment than it gets in this crude, baffling adventure.

Unimaginative adventure game with all the well-known problems of old as pixel-hunting and meaningless object shuffling. In addition, the game and its awkwardness killed a legacy of one cult movie.

The intriguing premise and some cleverly written cast members just serve to showcase that Randal's Monday not only could have been salvageable, it could even have been a really good game.

The story and visuals of Randal's Monday feel very promising at first. But this point-and-click suffers from a lack of sharp characters and dialogues, while the puzzle design can make you shed a tear as it asks you to try everything with all the items in your possession... without knowing why. A disappointment.

Randal's Monday is blind hero worship that ignores decades of design theory and leaves an unpleasant aftertaste thanks to its thoroughly unlikable, homogenous cast.

Barring the possible subtext about adventure game protagonists (which may be entirely in my head), the game is artistically bankrupt – it copies ideas, spouts constant references in lieu of jokes, and features a story so flawed that even its own writers seemed to give up by the end of it.