Always Sometimes Monsters doesn't play, look, or read as particularly human. Vagabond Dog's story about traveling across the United States to win back your first love, built in GameMaker, is a heady brew of visual novels like Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward and SNES-era Squaresoft role-playing games. Squat, big-eyed cartoon characters wander about squat cartoon college dorms and warehouses having lengthy conversations in a lackadaisical but outsized tone, like a less scatological Kevin Smith movie. Vagabond's new PAX East 2014 demo impresses because of how a deeply human game peeks through these layers of artifice.

"You can play as any race, gender, sexual orientation," Justin Amirkhani, creative director and writer on Monsters, explained. "People treat you differently based on who you are, what you look like, and whether they have personal prejudices or not."

​The demo demonstrates this philosophy well, but takes time to warm up. In a clever fourth wall-breaking sequence, Amirkhani and his partner Jake Reardon actually appear in the game, explaining why the player I'd get to control would be randomly selected. As a failsafe making sure my decisions reflected my own personality and prejudices, it worked nicely. The lovesick character picked for me came close to the mark: a white, heterosexual male writer. His great love? A Hispanic woman named Gina.