Curate of Curiosities

Previously, Brooks met up with an old friend who had a car that could take him to Amy's wedding. Along the way, he made a dog eat shit twice.

So here's a question for you: what do you think is the most unhinged thing I've showcased? We've got quite a few candidates:

• Marienbad My Love, the RNG-generated novel that was written well before GenAI became the scourge on the internet that it is,
• Class of '09, the so-called "anti-visual novel" starring a self-proclaimed sociopath, where you can have the entire student body invovled in a white nationalist organization, trick a jock into fatally maiming himself, or send your classmate's dick pics to everyone,
• Full Bokko Youchien, the oddly forgettable visual novel where you can throw a kindergartener off a cliff, as well as Mikoto Nikki, it's predecessor where you find out your crushis a murderous psychopath,
• Many of Molleindustria's games, such as Oiligarchy, where you can bring about global nuclear Armageddon through carefully manipulating oil supply,
• Tamara, that one comic that's what would happen if Cathy was both aimed at middle schoolers and really, really horny,
• I Hate You, Please Suffer, where the main character can end up with a rapist ghost inside her head pushing her to start a polycule,
• And, of course, The Demon Rush and its successors, the best worst RPGs ever made.

I mention all of these because you could make a very good case for this game being up there with some of those.

Yes, this is the place from the first dream sequence. Great place for a finale, the place where our hero once believed that he could fulfill his dreams.

And this is Casey, Amy's mother. She's not getting an answer as to why Brook and Amy broke up, because the game hasn't really given us the answer either...

...At least, until our last dream sequence that night, where we find that Amy didn't want to keep being Brooks' emotional crutch. So I'm sure she'll appreciate our coming all the way across the country for her wedding. Pretty relatable, wouldn't you think?

Sure enough, Amy herself shows up right after Brooks wakes up. Time to make things right...that was what we were doing here, right?

So it was all for nothing. Brooks sabotaged the mayor's reelection for nothing. He did drugs for nothing. He shat in a dog food bowl for nothing. He defrauded $6 from an old man for nothing.

Is this an attempt to make amends with his partner, or is he trying to rub the fact that he got married while his friend didn't in his face? I don't care.

Yep, it's the latter, he's trying to show off the expensive suit that he plans on wearing. $5000 sounds like a lot, but I'm sure that you can scrounge the budget together in the two weeks or so that we have before the ceremony.

Go back to our room and you'll find that Casey has found our journal! Okay, why? She's not even related to Brooks, and he's clearly an adult, so why does she feel she has the right to go through our things?

Wouldn't be the first time that I've been questioned on my motivations, but I believe that now, after much soul searching, I have a good idea as to why I've come all this way.

Ask the mayor if that bothers you so much! He's the one who had the idea of rigging the election machines in the first place!

A lot of our choices that she berates us for can be justified by the fact that we were really short on cash at the time.

And if the goal was to make us consider the choices that led us to this point, then there are two problems with that. One, this is what the whole game has been doing already, and two, Chrono Trigger did this much better back in 1995!

And here we are in Los Vargas for the bachelor party! Although there are a lot of ways to gamble, there's not a whole lot to spend money on. Even stamina's no longer an issue since the game skipped right to the day before the wedding.

The only thing we can do here is stubmble around the casino looking for the next plot flag, which just so happens to be in Brooks' hotel room!

Sam, you're about to get married, why on earth would you want a theft on your hands?

Hey, it's the hitman from the opening! His name is Chekhov, and as you could tell from the intro, he uses a gun. Ah yes, do you see, the developers are familiar enough with this literary device to namedrop it, so now you have to take this game seriously!

That's certainly one way of celebrating your impending marriage, by gambling away everything you have the day before to buy an expensive suit, then stealing your partner's still-in-production novel to claim the proceeds! Is Larry really that desperate that he'd make a deal with two former partners at the same time, even though only one of them has actually produced something?

I actually feel sorry for Amy. Being engaged to an irresponsible spender who stalked you while in college, and being pursued by another one at the same time, who you didn't even invite, but decided to show up anyway. In the meantime, you fiance is out getting in trouble with the mob the day before your wedding!

And of course he has another platitude to give us, even while threatening us with death!

Our choice, sacrifice our chance to regain our financial stability to save Sam, the man who stole from him ever since college, or keep our livelihood at the cost of his life.

Class of '09 taught me that in questionable situations like this, you double down.

And so, Sam is killed. We've betrayed the man who betrayed our partnership first by stealing our journal. Now I really feel sorry for Amy, being engaged to a man who died in the hopes of a nicer suit.

I'm sure this has probably been said plenty of times about this game, but it feels more like a first-time student film than a game. And as someone who took part in a filmmaking project in high school, this seems on par with what I saw my high school classmates making.

On to the wedding, even though news should have gotten out of the groom's death at this point.

Everyone's here, even the guy whose guitar I sold.

Well, you see, Amy, your fiance had a gambling problem that put him in debt to organized crime, and the only way to pay it back was for him to steal the novel that I was working on. It might be insensitive to say, but I'd say you dodged a bullet!

And now it's our turn to give a pseudo-philosophical monologue. I take back everything I said about this game overusing them, this may be the funniest thing I've seen in this game so far. I'm sure that whoever at the Canadian Video Game Awards was greatly moved by this, and would likely be just as moved, if not more so, by the contents of an edgy 14-year-old's diary.

And we're finally back at the alley, where Mr. Parker puts to words what we're all thinking after having to sit through six hours of this.

Once again, we have the option to shoot the hobo, but I'd like to find out what they look like first, get a bit of closure that way.

So this whole thing was Brooks telling us his story.

And here I was, thinking that The Reconstruction had an awkward title drop (multiple, in fact), but at least its title is a simple, and more importantly, grammatically correct phrase, and wasn't an extremely banal observation on humanity that some Canadian developer thought they could base a whole game around!

Now that we've listented to our hero's speech, it's time to do the reasonable thing...

The thing we should have done before he started yapping about the nature of the choices we make.

But not even killing him can stop to the endless platitudes; Chekhov turns to Mr. Parker and tells him that he's too much of a coward to make his own choices.

Whatever. At least the game is finally over.

So that was Always Sometimes Monsters. There are quite a few reviews that call this a load of pretentious, overwrought tripe, but I didn't need to read them to know that this was the case, when I could have just watched the trailer, or even read the blurb. And the game did not disappoint on that front. I want to know what possessed Vagabond Dog to have half the major NPCs in this game philosophize to you minutes after you meet them...

Psych! Game's not over yet!

Just when you thought this game couldn't suck its own dick any harder, after the credits, we are treated to Brooks at a signing for his book (which has the exact same logo as the game), while receiving the praise that Vagabond Dog would no doubt have anticipated from critics.

That's one of the game's creators. I am in sheer disbelief.

But there's one little thing that both Brooks and Larry seem to be unaware of: the fact that the journal implicates Brooks in tampering with a mayoral election, aiding an illegal dog fighting ring (which seems to be conjoined with a boxing studio, but that probably doesn't matter), and defrauding the elderly. The first one alone, if Trudeau Liberte's upset victory can be conclusively traced back to him, could not only have ripple effects for the city of Beaton, but also land Brooks in jail for a long time.

And then we go back to the house at San Verdano, where Brooks and Amy live out their new life together.

But wait, you may ask. How did he end up in the alley from the intro? Well, apparently, things didn't work out between him and Amy, and although he had a successful writing career to fall back on, he decided to become a homeless vagrant of his own accord.

And although I was for some reason reminded of Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass starting its postgame just like this, there is no postgame to speak of here, or any way to get a proper ending after this, just more of the boring minigames that were available at the first town. Welcome to the unending purgatory of domestic bliss.

But you know what, maybe it was cruel to leave Sam to die, so let's go back and give him the journal.

And for the next part of the game, you get to play as Sam, with his own predictably nonexistent budget, as he leaves Brooks at the mercy of the casino hitman. So now that we have the journal that our partner worked so hard on, what do we do with it now? Well, he did mention getting an advance payment for submitting the first draft, so we should go to Larry to collect.

But Larry, what about our contract? We had a contract! Don't tell me that you're letting him take credit for our hard work?

I don't even care about the wedding anymore, you just commited fraud to get out of a mess that you caused!

But there's no way out of this, Larry has already turned in the draft to the publisher under Sam's name, so his future is secured, and Brooks gets nothing.

Not even trying to stop the wedding will do anything, since Amy would rather marry a plagiarist than a man who would use her as a crutch. Too bad that I never really cared about Brooks getting back together with her.

Other than that, this ending's not too different from the one that we got before, except Sam is the one at the book signing, and since he's the one who marries Amy, you play as him in the epilogue at her house. But this also means that since he took credit for the book that mentioned election tampering, then he'll be the one going to jail once it gets traced back to him.

Oh, and don't worry about Brooks this time, I have Chekhov shoot him before he can reveal himself.

Now, do you want to know what happens when you shoot the hobo at the start, before he starts rambling about choices and consequences?

You get told, in a very condescending tone, that this is not how things are supposed to go. I don't think that I would expect it to go any other way.