Endless Monday Visual Novel: A Commentary on AI and Corporations

 

Screenshot of Endless Monday Main Menu by hcnone

Endless Monday: Dreams and Deadlines and Overtime allows players to navigate as Penny, an office worker in the Creative department who has a bad habit of procrastinating her projects. Players get to decide when she focuses on her work and when she gets distracted—and which distractions to embrace. 

Already, this sounds so relevant to many people in this type of job, especially in this technological era where it's commonplace to claim you have "the attention span of a goldfish" (or a dog because—"Squirrel!"). While this Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) visual novel game starts off as a typical office day, it starts to veer into the realm of absurd and "just-go-with-it" thinking, revealing that working in a colorless workplace may not be good for one's mental health and that strange things are happening behind closed corporate doors.

After playing Endless Monday, I see it as a satirical, meta, and realistic representation of two things: 

1. Artists who kill and lament their dreams to pursue a financially stable corporate job/career that sucks the soul out of them versus the artists who also pursue said job, but maintain their creativity and chaotic self, continuing to work on developing their dreams in any and every free moment.
2. The rise of AI due to corporations with selfish desires for power and profit as well as a disregard for AI's impact on creative human thought and critical thinking. 

Please note: 

• I am writing this post after one playthrough of both the visual novel and the bonus chapter "Overtime," so I am still unaware of all the paths and/or alternate endings. 
• The content is derived from my own opinions and speculations and doesn't reflect those of anyone else.
• The lyrics from Shower Song are what I could hear from the song and may not be 100% correct since I cannot find any lyrics for it online. 

-- Spoilers --

Photo by Samson on Unsplash

Relevancy to Now

Across social media, there are various conversations that are have grown quite loud within the last few years. Some of which are touched upon and discussed in Endless Monday. 

Lack of Color and the Switch to the Minimalist Style

People have been a buzz with talk of color comparisons from the past (e.g., 1960s, 70s, and 80s) with the 2000s; how companies have, over time, removed color from public spaces, cars, clothes, architecture, home interiors, workplaces, etc. 

In this Instagram reel, hypnotherapist Rebecca Jackson shows the same photos that have been circulating around social media, including the then (colorful, full of character) and now photos (neutrals, devoid of personality) of the Home Alone house. "I think this is deliberately being orchestrated to make us feel dead inside, right? Because color is actually very stimulating to the brain... [colors] make us creative." 

When I was in my last year of university, the library was being renovated, but students could still go there and study in certain areas. During my time, they had an abundance of study carrels that reminded me of the office cubicles my father had at his computer-related jobs when I was a kid (I got to visit sometimes when everyone had left much like Penny in Endless Monday). The study carrels provided a workspace, but most importantly, privacy that helped the person focus so that they could be productive. The colors of these carrels varied between shades of wood (blonde to deep brown) or grey fabric with grey plastic framing. 

Photo by MEDIA PROFILE on Unsplash

When the renovations were finally done, it was absolutely abhorrent. They had gone with an open-concept minimalist design that mirrored the style of Apple: 

• Glass everywhere meant zero privacy, the sense of being watched from all angles, no sound buffers, and being distracted constantly when the people all around you moved.
• A useless quarter glass partition running down the center of the tables.
• One large table for several people meant an increased encroachment upon your neighbors' space with bags as well as feet and chair placement.
• White flooring and tables that were blinding, even moreso when the library's windows were not covered, so the sun could stream in.

I had to use the library for the last two months of my final year and I wanted to strangle all the people who agreed to this because it was very obvious they didn't think through how it would impact the people using these areas. The additions of sound-proof meeting rooms with codes to get in seemed like a smart idea to me (despite half of the room having glass walls), however, I never actually used one, so who knows how good it actually was. 

Stuck in this stark office, Penny does what I've done countless times: she daydreams... or does she? Because she is a creative individual with an OC already well developed, she rests her eyes and dreams of Tiger-chan on her island, but upon waking, finds Tiger-chan, larger than life, in the office with her. In her search for inspiration, Penny conjures up a very colorful individual, thereby bringing color into the drab workplace. It reminds me of Hamlet and how readers and audience members never know for sure whether Hamlet went out of his mind or if it was a clever ruse. Tiger-chan is always suspiciously absent when other people are in the office. 

Even in the bonus chapter, one of the illustrations Penny must make for her project consists of selling the idea that grey rectangles are interesting. She tries, but even she isn't one hundred percent sold on her own poster.

Photo by Ed Hardie on Unsplash

A Shorter Work Week/Longer Weekend

The concepts of "Endless Monday" and overtime explored in this visual novel game creates a narrative many people have lived and continue to experience. From Working Girl (1988) to The Proposal (2009), many capitalistic companies continue to take advantage of their staff in various ways.

While we're told that Penny's predicament is of her own making, the title "Endless Monday" may have been chosen because:

1. It's a widely recognized and dreaded start of the workweek, so to have it as "endless" would be a nightmare.
2. It could be a reference to how employees in various countries want a longer weekend or have already gotten their three-day weekends. According to HDR Connect, "In the UK, a trial involving 61 companies and more than 2,900 workers found that 92% of the companies continued with the four-day week after the study was completed." The Guardian (in 2023) adds to this:

In total, about 2,900 employees across the UK have taken part in the pilot. Surveys of staff taken before and after found that 39% said they were less stressed, 40% were sleeping better and 54% said it was easier to balance work and home responsibilities [...] The number of sick days taken during the trial fell by about two-thirds and 57% fewer staff left the firms taking part compared with the same period a year earlier.

Belgium in 2025 has a different story where there is less enthusiasm for this concept. While they offer the four-day workweek regime, it seems to be only beneficial for certain sizes of companies, "Four in ten companies with more than 500 employees (39.2%) have at least one full-time employee working under the four-day regime. In companies with 200 to 500 employees, this is the case for 19.3%." Very large Belgian companies have the ability to provide "more possibilities to ensure continuity and process everything administratively," according to the legal expert at Acerta Consult.

In the visual novel game, Penny may be the reason for her working during the weekend, but Skye and Hana, who used to work and currently work in the Operations department, are a little different. Skye was unhappy with her job and quit to start her own online air fryer cooking show. This is like booktubers quitting their job once they see their channels are becoming lucrative. Many Twitch streamers are full-time, as well as social media influencers. Skye is an example of someone taking a chance on themselves, although, she should have waited for her online show to pan out before quitting her day job. 

On the other hand, we have Hana who got stuck with Skye's workload in addition to her own and is on call all the time. While Skye is forced to think about her work 24/7 for her business, Hana is forced to work overtime by being ready for work at the ring of a phone. In Skye's case, she has control over her schedule, as we find out in our first phone call with her. She says she did some travelling prior to starting up her show and spent that day in bed because she's losing faith and motivation in her success. In Hana's case, she doesn't have a true weekend of rest since she's working 24/7 mentally, waiting for work problems to arise while doing things, such as play a video game. 

Abuse of Power

Skye and Hana's situations remind me of Jonah Scott/Alpha Aniki's Shower Song about an employee who wants a holiday and questions the corporate world. 

Both Skye and Hana could probably relate:

"Like a workin' dog, I need a holiday/ We made what you're lookin' for [...] Stuck fast in the nine to five/We deserve a rest for clockin' overtime."

Released in 2025, Shower Song was probably inspired by the U.S turmoil, especially with a businessman as the country's president. Blythe, the head of the Operations department, represents all that's wrong with people in power. Starting with Skye's so-called "betrayal," Blythe abuses her power by having the company create and/or adapt various robots that resemble Skye and do what she does for her cooking show (i.e., produce zines and host its own cooking show, which represent AI-generated slop) to take away subscribers from Skye and essentially, crush Skye's potential self-made success. 

Penny's project documentation is written in the classic business jargon where she's unsure what her requirements are and what the product does, demonstrating how big corporations try to hide information so that employees don't know what they're making (because if they did know, they wouldn't do it and have something to say about it). People in power like to think they're self-made, which isn't often the case, as Jonah Scott points out in Shower Song, "Self-made? Well, how 'bout that?/But who made the wheels on your Cadillac?" A company is made up of many individuals and when one department decides to not follow through, the process—and by extension, the company—falls apart.

Side note: I noticed while writing this post that the image used for Shower Song has much of the same coloring like today's minimalist office, but the creative part, Alpha's clothing, stands out like Tiger-chan in all her colorful glory.

Photo by Zulfugar Karimov on Unsplash

Putting AI In Everything (Even When It's Not Needed) 

As mentioned earlier, Blythe had the latest robot in the series look like a former employee, Skye, and create its own air frying cooking show to compete with Skye all because Blythe was angry and felt betrayed for Skye, her employee, quitting the company to pursue her own happiness. This demonstrates how employees must fight against management and other powerful entities in the company. 

In the bonus chapter, we see a second zine issue Skye made to promote her passion for air fryers. It mirrors the conversations and fights artists are having with AI stealing their work and people blindly using AI to generate everything. Skye gets to the heart of the matter:

An artist wants to express something creatively, and paints a picture, or writes a song, or makes an air frying cooking show. There is intent in each decision the artist makes to create the piece. Every line, word, or stroke of the pen, informed by a lifetime of experiences. It can then be shared and appreciated and related to by other people, and a human connection is formed. This makes art meaningful. When a creative community is flooded by simulacrums of human art generated by automatons... [a]ll human expression and connection within the space is devalued. There is no intent behind these generated works - they are not personal, and there is no culmination of an artist's experience and growth. While the output of automatons may superficially resemble human art, there is no meaning, and nothing is said. It inhibits the connection of a shared human experience, which is truly among the cruelest consequences of [AI].

While Skye's situation is unique since the motivation behind using AI in the artistic field is targeted to her, companies in reality released AI to the world when it is still at the age of a young child. People now create content that is stealing from artists and generating fake information that can be hard to discern at times, making "fake news" an even realer reality we are currently in. And on the other hand, we have AI bots who have demonstrated their murderous intent, that nature and human life has no value to them.

From Google to Microsoft to Amazon, companies immediately added AI bots to their products and websites without asking their clientele if they wanted/needed it, and sometimes, they make customers automatically "opt into" AI-related features without telling them.  

The popular comic strip Dilbert by Scott Adams has captured a myriad of office-related malarkey over the years that many office workers can relate to, especially how management or the higher-ups often don't know what they're doing nor do they truly care to see and understand how the work is actually done. This usually results in the workers (and sometimes, the customers) paying for the consequences of uninformed decisions. And why? Often, because the company is focused on profits and making stakeholders happy instead of helping the world. 

Dilbert comic strip by Scott Adams

As said in the ending of Shower Song, "Step down, Corpo/We'll take the throne." Give the workers, the people making the products or providing the services, the power since they know the right things to do with it.

AI's Impact

When corporations and companies start using AI in workflows, it can lead to redundancy. One of the alternate endings of Endless Monday is Blythe somehow having the power to lay off both Miss Whiskey and Penny, both of whom are in a different department from Blythe. Although, given that Blythe has two large bodyguards and toys with a knife, I suppose anyone would go along with what she said. In cases like this, being fired from a job you weren't happy doing and/or weren't great at can be a blessing in disguise because it gives you the space to determine what you want out of life now. Both Miss Whiskey and Penny decide to start a company together doing what they love. In another alternate ending where only Penny was laid off, she returns home and follows a path in farming, discovering a love for it. While it's not pleasant to be laid off, humans are adaptable, resilient, and, above all, creative.

Photo by Roger Ce on Unsplash

As mentioned earlier when in a boring environment, the millennial's kind of patience is woven throughout where you, as Penny, have to make your own entertainment (she has a phone with one mindless game on it, but that's it) and use your imagination when you're bored. This can also prompt the millennial's nostalgia when toys and games were simpler compared to now and still brought so much joy. For example, pixel art and text-based games, which is the style Penny's dreams take on in the main Endless Monday game as well as in the bonus chapter. Take a look on Steam and you'll find a lot of visual novels (e.g., The Divine Speaker, A Date with Death, and When the Night Comes) and other games, such as Book Bound done in the pixel art style where simple maneuvers and tasks provide a cozy vibe (one which many crave during the insanity still going on in the world). Much like during the first Romantic movement when industrialization was taking over, people sought out nature and poetry (e.g., Wordsworth, Blake, Coleridge) and during this tech era, people continue to look for a balance between work and play on their devices versus spending time unplugged, out in the fresh air and living in the moment.

Conclusion

I went into Endless Monday looking to play a fun story-based game, but found so much more! I did not expect to write a blog post about it, but the story and relevancy it has to now moved me so much. Well done to the team for making this game, and I cannot wait to play the next one!

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