Tag Archives: day of the tentacle

LucasArts Time Machine: Day Of The Tentacle

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This one is going to be tricky. Everything I am about to write is, in a way, largely redundant, because I already wrote an In Praise Of post about Day Of The Tentacle back when I still wrote In Praise Of posts, and I also reviewed the Remastered version when it came out in 20161. I think it is a strong contender for the best adventure game ever made, it’s probably also the smartest adventure game ever made, and Day Of The Tentacle is the one game in this series that I actively go out of my way to replay every few years. Because of this, it’s also the one game in this series where I have the entire solution already memorised. I don’t need a walkthrough to beat Day Of The Tentacle. I’ll never need a walkthrough to beat Day Of The Tentacle.

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  1. Which is a pretty decent piece of work, and it would have been the one I played today if I weren’t specifically trying to play the version that was originally released in 1993.
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Thoughts: Day Of The Tentacle Remastered

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So-called “Remastered” editions of classic games have been very much the in thing for the last few years, this being a relatively low-effort way to get money for old rope. That the remasters often turn out to somehow be worse than the originals, either through technical issues (Age Of Empires 2, Homeworld) or because they completely miss the point of what made the original games great (the Monkey Island remasters) hasn’t at all dissuaded developers from their efforts to tap directly into gamers’ nostalgia glands, and so now it is Day Of The Tentacle’s turn to be disinterred, spruced up a little bit and rudely thrust back into the limelight.

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In Praise Of: Day Of The Tentacle.

While waiting for a rather large file to download the other day I stumbled across my ScummVM install of Day of the Tentacle. Day of the Tentacle is special to me. Most people cite Grim Fandango or one of the Monkey Island games as the pinnacle of Lucasarts’ adventure game prowess, but for my money nothing can quite beat the time-travelling screwiness of Day of the Tentacle. It’s an adventure split into three different games in three different periods that both run in parallel and in series with each other; changes made in the past will affect the present, changes made in the present affect the future, and items can be traded between different time periods. This all combines to make the game a twisty brain-teaser that’s somewhat akin to trying to complete three jigsaw puzzles at once that constantly affect each other as you add more and more pieces; the sort of thing that would burn your brain out if Day of the Tentacle wasn’t charming and funny to boot. I can usually finish old Lucasarts adventures in less than three hours (unless they’re The Dig) since the solutions to all the puzzles tend to be indelibly etched into my noggin. Let’s see how long Day of the Tentacle takes me, shall we?

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