Day of the Tentacle

You know what they say: "To save the world, you have to push a few old ladies down the stairs."

Before the wave of retro point-and-click adventures started by Wadjet Eye and their Blackwell, before crappy Broken Age, before Grim Fandango and before even classics such as Monkey Island, there was Maniac Mansion. But heck, that one's too old even for me¹, so I'm going to skip straight to its spiritual successor, Day of the Tentacle.

DotT is not just adventure by the book, it's one of the games straight out of the book, heck, it among others wrote the damn book. Not unlike Grim Fandango, it bears the signature of none other than Tim Schafer, but unlike Grim Fandango, it stands not at the end of an era, but exactly at the beginning of the glorious decade of lovely pixeled adventure games. Plus, it also, in fact it mainly bears the signature of that other giant, Ron Gilbert.

The story is banal bordering on completely uninteresting. Tentacle alpha (tentacle beta's best friend) decides to take over the world so Bernard the stereotypical geek, Hoagie the stereotypical teenage rocker and Laverne the stereotypical crazy chick need to help Dr. Fred Edison², the stereotypical mad scientist, to "turn things back to normal" by going forward, backward and respectively at the same place in time. This is far, far, far below Monkey Island's level of writing.

And yet that doesn't take away from the game's brilliance, as it contains the number one ingredient which made every good Lucas game, which is humour -- lots and lots of it, in all possible flavours. The founding fathers are a bunch of wimps, both clueless and arrogant; the master race of tentacles are in fact a personification of the outrageous stupidity of humans; the so-called "human show" is a futuristic depiction of every "reality show" out there; and last but not least, the amount of pop culture³ referencing and mocking is insane.

On the artsy schmartsy side of things, the acting is below Lucas' standards, although Nick Jameson does a decent Dr. Fred, while the music is subtly beautiful and the graphics are top-notch even for the 2000s, let alone 1993⁴. On the technical side of things, the SCUMM engine does its job, while the puzzle design is at times friggin' horrendous⁵, while today's user interface designers could learn a thing or two about "user experience" from the early Lucas games⁶.

Overall a must-have and a must-play. The first playthrough can be done in a week-end, while subsequent ones (or sessions aided by a walkthrough) last no more than two hours. If you get to play it together with a seven to fourteen year-old English-speaking kid, you'll both absolutely love it.