In the era of 2026, more and more creative industries are being, confusingly, outsource to AI; creative writing, publishing games and more. In Did a Monkey Write This? you are a young author, who has hit writers block and finds writing books too overwhelming – after all, on Amazon, there are thousands of books published each day – how are you meant to compete? Thankfully, you have your own pet ape that is able to write the rest of your book for you. This ape also had the idea to hire their cousins, also known as Ape Intelligence or AI, to write the rest of your books and make millions.
Did a Monkey Write This? is a very silly concept, with the story of using this twist on ‘AI’ to write books. Are these books any good? Who knows, but at the end of the day you are making money and feeding some monkeys! It’s more of an idle game, with you needing to let your monkeys write the books before you publish them and spend the loot.
The monkeys do not require money for the books they write, but they do require you to feed them fruit. At first, you only have a little bruised banana to purchase, but through the skill tree you are able to purchase more fruit types, which feed them for longer, remove more of their hunger.
If they become completely hungry, they will stop working and wait to be fed. If you run out of money and are unable to feed them, and they’ve stopped working, you are out of luck.
When it comes to publishing your books you start off by getting bonuses by throwing tomatoes at your professor’s face – the more accurate your throw, the better your profit! This soon changes to a slot machine, that you will be adding different icons to, each time you use it. You can purchase new icons from the skill tree – each of them have their own abilities and this machine can really hold a lot! It took me probably a dozen books before I actually was able to hit any of the icons and get further bonuses.
As the books get longer, it takes more food (and time) for them to finish, but you will end up with more profit! You can upgrade your home, hire more monkeys, fix up your slot machine, and so much more, just to create these possibly good books. Did a monkey write this? feels tongue in cheek as a concept, and the pacing feels very good for a incremental game.
You can wishlist Did a Monkey Write This? on Steam and play the demo on itch.io.
