Curate of Curiosities

Previously on Always Sometimes Monsters, Brooks moved some boxes filled with his books that didn't sell, apparently on behalf of the publishing equivalent of Netflix, and then took part in sabotaging a city election. Don't ask me why he'd even think of doing something like that. Getting isekai'd does things to a man.

So here we are in Salt City, possibly the drabbest town we've visited so far. Not only is the city's landscape dominated by the highway bisecting it, but most of it is covered in concrete. And worst of all, no fishing spots!

So every town in this game has a vagrancy problem. Given that every city we've visited seems to be based off an American city, that says a lot about how Vagabond Dog sees the country.

The reason we're here is to meet up with Mark, an old friend of Brooks. Weird thing is, this guy looks more like my character's namesake than he does.

He tells us how he was a bit of a mess in his youth, but Jesus set him straight. I'm not sure that I expected this game to touch on religion, much less to have a non-dismissive view on it.

On one side, a church...

And on the other, a strip club!

You know what, let's go for it. After everything that we've done so far, I'd say that we need Jesus.

We've done quite a few horrible things over the past two weeks or so, so it's nice we have the opportunity to confess them. We can even confess to how we had our falling out with Sam, which was mentioned in the first dream sequence we had in Dubstown.

See? And it wasn't even entirely Brooks' fault; there was only room for one name on the contract, and Larry's the one who pushed us to cut him out. That's business for you, but it looks like a contrived way to screw him over for no reason.

Like in Beaton, we have a consistent place to sleep in Mark's room. Unlike Beaton, Salt City doesn't seem to have much of a nightlife, so we're going straight there.

And here's another dream sequence. Like last time, it revolves around Brooks' college years with Sam. This one allows us to look through their shared dorm for a pencil for him to finish his essay. What we find is the game trying to remind us that it has very important things to say about morality, you guys.

I can imagine that some degree of effort went into this.

Off to the principal's office to turn in the essay. But it looks like before we were here, he and the science teacher (remember her from the last dream sequence) were getting busy.

Sam somehow managed to turn in his essay before we did. Brooks protests that there's no way that he could have copied off of Sam, but at this point, both have been pretty unpleasant, so who knows who copied who?

At least we get to hook up with Amy. I'm sure that Sam will take this in a reasonable, mature manner.

Since Mark is such a good friend, he'll give us a ride to the wedding, free of charge!

But things can't be that simple. They can never be that simple. Mark's car's a hunk of junk that needs to be fixed, but he's in debt to the mechanic, and the only way for him to pay it off is to beat the mechanic in a race with the same car that's stuck in the garage due to its state of disrepair.

For that, we need some replacement parts, but Mark's girlfriend really doesn't want him behind the wheel of that wreck, and so suggests a better plan to win the race: sabotage the mechanic's brakes.

Although this would probably get us to the wedding venue faster, I've already gotten right with Jesus. I'm going to fix Mark's car fair and square.

The first part to get is the tires, which you can get by becoming a boxing champion.

Before you start, you're given a tutorial about the different types of punches and dodges, and how they interact with each other. You don't actually need to bother with it, since the first three opponents you face can be beaten by just randomly flailing until they run out of stamina.

Well, there ain't no law that says a dog can't be boxing champion!

And as you can guess by the size of her health bar, she can easily outlast whatever strategy you think that you've come up with for the other boxers. And worse, when you lose the match, you're out for a whole day. At this point, I was about 12 or so days in, so my first loss wasn't anything major, but I didn't want to keep throwing myself at her until time ran out. We'll need to find some way to even the odds.

Can you guess how exactly he tampers with her food?

Simple, by dropping his pants and taking a shit right in the bowl!

Yes, while some random masked hobo is lecturing to a man who wants him dead, they take the time to mention a dog somehow unknowingly eating turd kibble.

You know what would make this much better? If, in times like this, it cut back to the alley with the hobo, and you're given the option to shoot them or let them keep talking.

And even after that, Princess is still a tough customer, but since she's a dog and has no real strategy, you can beat her by randomly flailing like the other opponents, thus making her eat shit twice.

On to parts whose acquisition hopefully will not involve forcing anyone to eat feces. In order to get the cleaning supplies, you need to take drugs to prove you're not a cop. Except it's not drugs at all, he was just having some good fun at our expense. That's nice, now give us the...

Oh wait, it is real drugs. Wouldn't be the worst thing that Brooks has been up to, even in this town alone.

Each of the car parts we need can only be gotten during a specific time of day, so it's impossible to get all of them in one day. Meaning that each time we go to bed, we have to listen to Mark's girlfriend ask us whether we want her to cut the mechanic's breaks and get this over with sooner.

And lastly, to get the car's transmission, you have to help this old man play the lottery. In theory, they could be a good way to make back the money I spent on the bus ticket, but they cost $5 each and redeeming a winning ticket only gives you $6. I guess that's one way of working the game world's really persistent poverty problem into the gameplay.

I give him all of my winning tickets...except one! And I turn that one in for all of six dollars! Whatever shall he do when he finds out that I have successfully cheated him out of six whole dollars?

One more thing, I've already mentioned how I've spent most of my money to afford the ticket out of Beaton. I still have some fish left from there, but it wasn't long before they started to run out. So, I had to sell some unused inventory items, including Darkeff's guitar that he gave me for whatever reason, in order to buy food to keep my stamina topped off.

Now that the car's fixed, it's off to the races!

But before that, let's check on where the bride-to-be will be having her venue. It looks like the location isn't anywhere special, just a reminder that the game was made in the 2010s.

It would be nice if we actually got to play through it, but sadly, Vagabond Dog just couldn't be bothered to program in a tedious racing minigame to go with the other tedious minigames in this game.

But Mark manages to win, and so pays off his debt to Stan.

And we have our ticket to the wedding venue, with more than two weeks to spare!

And that was Salt City. Aside from the car part fetch quest, there wasn't a whole lot going on. The fact that you have the option to go to church and confess your sins (the apparent alternative being to visit a strip club) was a nice touch, but it's immediately undercut by you doing even more unsavory things, like doing drugs, possibly defrauding an old man, and possibly shitting in a dog food bowl.

Speaking of, aside from that last one, the horrible choices we have to make are pretty pedestrian compared to the animal abuse and political sabotage we engaged in in the last two towns. And even the last one is dependent on you making a certain choice back in Dubstown. Combined with the limited ways to keep yourself fed here, it makes this part of the game seem like a bit of a drag, which is saying something by this game's standards.