Point-and-click adventure games rely on two things to entice people. The first is a great story, which games like Broken Sword and The Longest Journey accomplish with a sense of intrigue and mystery. The other is humor, usually in the case of titles like Sam & Max Hit the Road or Space Quest. Randal's Monday, a new game from Nexus Game Studios, aims for the latter. In particular, it goes for humor aimed at the geek culture of a specific time period.

You play as Randal Hicks, a character who is described as a kleptomaniac, a sociopath, and an all-around moron. When the game begins, you're at the bar with your friends Matt and Sally to celebrate their engagement. As Sally goes to the bar to get more drinks, Matt shows you the engagement ring he got for her. After an unfortunate vomiting incident, you come into the possession of both his wallet and his ring. The next day, you run into your landlord, who's demanding three months' worth of rent that you've failed to pay. With nothing else of value, you pawn the ring. This action leads to Matt killing himself, and you, in a strange turn of events, must replay the same day over and over again to get things right.

What follows can be best described as a crude video game version of "Groundhog Day," as both star insufferable people being forced to relive the day until they correct all the wrongs and become better people. The big difference is that Randal slightly alters the following day that's repeated. Predicting how events go becomes a little harder since things are constantly in flux, and that makes for an intriguing setup for the game.

Given the strange story, Randal's Monday needs to be buoyed by a fascinating set of characters.  Randal provides an abundance of snark and a slacker attitude. Both Sally and Matt play the typical patient fiancée and hapless boyfriend, respectively, but the apparent lack of intelligence between them is reminiscent of characters in a bad sitcom. There's also a bum who's crazy/philosophical, but from what we've seen so far, other people you meet — an angry boss, a subway ticket vendor who's disinterested in her job, and an emotionless pawn shop vendor — aren't very interesting.

The humor is dry and depends on outrageous dialogue and content, but it's rather inconsistent, so the title tries to rely on nostalgia and references. In the prologue alone, there are references to "Futurama," "The Lord of the Rings," "The Simpsons," and games like Maniac Mansion. As the game progresses, there are references to other classic games like The Legend of Zelda, Resident Evil, and The Secret of Monkey Island. Movie shout-outs to films like "Back to the Future," "Ghostbusters," and "Jurassic Park" are all present. Even game consoles like the Dreamcast and Game Boy show up.

The references are nice, and given the sheer amount of them, all players are bound to recognize something. However, the references are catalysts for little quips that don't go anywhere, and the special trinkets aren't used in a meaningful way, so they end up being background noise.

The gameplay is rather traditional for the genre. You can talk to characters to initiate branching conversations that can lead to a small puzzle or give you a hint of how to solve a puzzle in progress. The environments are littered with hotspots, and you can even combine some items to create new ones that are used to solve puzzles. Adopting the mechanic that Daedelic has been using for a while now, you can perform everything with both mouse buttons and the scroll wheel, and you can also hold down the space bar to show all of the hot spots in each scene. Puzzles still lean to the senseless side, though, and there are plenty of situations where the solution is so cryptic that you'll have to click on everything in your inventory and everything in the scene to stumble upon it. Genre fans may be used to this, but it can be a breaking point for other players.

As far as presentation goes, the game hits the right marks. On the sound front, Jeff Anderson plays the role of Randal, and considering the similarities between this character and the Randal from the "Clerks" movies, he nails the role perfectly. The same goes for the rest of the cast members who voice their characters just as well. Graphically, the animations are smooth enough, except for lip movements, which are limited and jerky. The art style, which is similar to "Family Guy," fits the theme of the game when you think about how Seth Macfarlane's series frequently mines nostalgia for laughs.

Randal's Monday has a good amount going for it. The look is clean, the animations are mostly smooth, and the voice work is very nice. The puzzles are slightly obscure, but veterans of the genre will see that as par for the course. Where the game can falter is its dependence on rapid-fire references that take over for some rather hit-and-miss humor. It's difficult to tell whether those references will save or hurt the game in later chapters, but that makes Randal's Monday is a title to watch when it releases this November.