Unlikely name for a game, Always Sometimes Monsters

When I bought this game, after reading some reviews, I know it's not going to be your typical RPG where you hack and slash through your enemies, loot their gold and possessions, and buy yourself some equipments and pose yourself as the knight in shiny armor. No, this is game where the reality sinks in, and before you know it, you are robbing homeless people of their sandwich, selling fake drug to a stranger girl, and blackmailing the doctor who refused to give your friend free treatment (who ODed), because you have a need..., to get your life back.

Ironic? Maybe. Self-entitlement? Perhaps. This game gives you gray areas to explore, and sometimes too easy to legitimize our final decisions as essential to get ahead in life.

I played a white guy with scruffy goatee, who was dating a beefy black guy. In the early part of the game, the agent of the the main character hosted the party. While you're in his POV, you get to select the main character you'll end up playing (it's creative and confusing at time), and you'll get to select your sexual orientation, when your MC picked the friend you're going to introduce to the agent. In the beginning, everyone presented in the party, though in various degrees of politeness, are somewhat hopeful to the future, though some might sounds a little cynical than others. The game flash forward one year ahead, and you found out your main character is full of broken dreams and had trouble getting the rent paid.

I am not finished with the game yet, but my character was giving some advices to NPCs which they should have taken themselves. I feel hypocritical at times while playing the game, because I am the guy who's behind my main character.... Most of my decisions were made to minimize the damage done to others, while I still could still get my objectives done, that is, get my rent paid, my past mistakes undone. I could also blatantly out to hurt people by playing the zero-sum game, though I didn't, but inevitably, people still get hurt along the way in some form.

I almost got a kid killed, for example. I was merely trying to make a few bucks reselling a convention ticket, the kid stole his drug-dealing uncle's money in order to pay me. I could have just taken the money and ran away, and let the kid shot by his uncle and lay dead in the backyard pool. I ended up paying the uncle (and lose the profit), hoping I wouldn't get killed myself (and fortunately I was still alive by the end of the ordeal). There are many examples of such dilemmas in the game. However, one could also legitimizing it by saying it's the boy's poor decision that got him killed. After all, my ex-boss in real life also said we were only selling people store credit cards. It's their own responsibility if they got into debts. So the scenario is definitely observable in real life.

In fact, "legitimizing" was the buzz word back in Organizational Behavior class. And the entire course was around mental maturity: how to move ourselves from the mindset of personal interests and the mindset of using company interests to disguise our personal interests, and transcend them to the mindset that's beyond self.

I'll end my rant here. This game doesn't have the best graphics (the pixelated 16-bit graphics cries out indie garage game), and occasionally has a few quirks that I thought could have been done better, but it's a game for people who like to think deeper. It is the way we live now. What does an evil person look like? As one professor asked. Do they have evil written on their face? Probably not. Because if not careful, we could be the monsters that we always look out for sometimes.

A few indie games that are thought-provoking: Dangerous High School Girls (warning, has rape scene, though in literary form, not shown on screen. The game might not run well in modern computer), Canvasser (a free online game where you play as political canvasser to save the forest, and it's very depressing).

A review of the game perhaps sums up better than my rant here. http://www.gamingnexus.com/Article/4418/Always-Sometimes-Monsters/