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.

And this is a bit of a problem, since I have come at all of the previous games from a place where I can remember maybe 20% of the ones I’ve played before, but I am mostly playing them completely fresh and so can get a good idea of how frustrating (or not) the puzzles and game structure are. I don’t have the luxury of that viewpoint with Day Of The Tentacle; to me, all of the puzzles just make sense² even though I am reliably informed by people who are going through it for the first time that they find several parts of it to be confusing and counterintuitive. Playing through it for the eleventh or twelfth time with an eye on how well the game breadcrumbs its puzzles does make me think that that most things in Day Of The Tentacle are either pretty well-signposted, or else can be worked out using normal human logic despite the time-travelling premise — there’s nothing here on the order of the sodding crab sandwich in Fate Of Atlantis. Still, it should be kept in mind that I am hardly a neutral observer where this game is concerned, and I couldn’t be objective even if I wanted to. I love Day Of The Tentacle too damn much for that.

Now, that all being said, it was definitely interesting coming at Day Of The Tentacle having played LucasArts’ prior body of adventure game work beforehand, since there’s a couple of things that I think it does particularly well in light of previous attempts that did not. For example, it’s the first LucasArts adventure game that was designed to be fully-voiced from the start — by modern standards the actors put in a performance that’s good rather than outstanding (although nearly every line that comes out of Dr Fred’s mouth is excellent) but which fits the Saturday morning cartoon nature of the game, and most of the jokes are written with voice acting in mind and leverage this magical thing known as “comic timing” that the previous games could not, and so it holds up pretty well today. By 1993 standards, however, Day Of The Tentacle is nothing short of exceptional. Loom and Fate Of Atlantis both had voiced versions released after the original text-based ones, but because they were afterthoughts that were solely trading off the fact that people wanted full multimedia experiences that would make use of their expensive CD-ROM drives rather than anything actually designed for voice-acting from the get-go, both of these prior attempts were extremely ropey to the point where I wouldn’t have played with the voice acting on even if I’d had the option. By contrast I can’t imagine playing DOTT without voice acting since it adds so much to the experience, and it set the standard for future LucasArts adventures which all had a similar quality of voice acting; it was one of the big selling points for their games that made them feel so much more polished than the competition.

That goes for the art and animation too, which have weathered the 27 years since the original release astonishingly well thanks to their highly stylised nature. Day Of The Tentacle is a full-on cartoon and it leverages this to good effect, with all of the comedy Wile-E-Coyote animations (eyes bulging, necks stretching, falling off of high places and leaving person-shaped holes in the ground, that kind of thing) that Monkey Island 2 arguably overused feeling perfectly at home here. The background art for the various locations inside the mansion is full of crazy, irregular shapes and oversized cartoonish proportions on otherwise normal objects, which is a style that I don’t usually enjoy but which works here, and which has insulated Day Of The Tentacle from aging like the more realistic backgrounds in Fate Of Atlantis did. And something that I hadn’t realised before doing this series was that Day Of The Tentacle was the last hurrah for the interaction verb UI; the intro sequence is a good indicator that it might be outstaying its welcome with LucasArts, as this gorgeous full-screen cartoon suddenly loses the bottom third of its screen area to a comparatively ugly interface, and after DOTT LucasArts ditched it in favour of some alternative approaches starting with Sam & Max. It still works perfectly well here and I do have a soft spot for the specific iterations of it that were used in DOTT and Monkey Island 2, but this time around I got a definite sense that it was starting to be left behind by the ridiculous pace of technological improvement in the ‘90s PC market and that it might be time for something new, which is not something that I think I would have said if I hadn’t just played through eight games that used it in a row.

It’s also been interesting to see what Day Of The Tentacle has in common with Maniac Mansion, which it is ostensibly a sequel to. The answer is: not all that much, really — it keeps the character switching mechanic and the concept of exploring a single mansion location, but while it also recycles characters such as Bernard and Dr Fred they might as well be from completely separate universes since all they really have in common are the names. However, where Maniac Mansion had multiple characters exploring the same mansion — which is unexpectedly complex, since many of its puzzles involve having characters positioned in separate locations doing some finicky timing-based puzzle — Day Of The Tentacle introduces a hard border between its three protagonists by separating them into three different time periods at the beginning of the game. Hoagie explores the mansion in the past, Bernard explores it in the present, and Laverne explores it in the future, and despite the potential complexity that all time-travelling shenanigans inevitably invite I actually think this makes Day Of The Tentacle a far simpler game. To compensate for being split over three different timestreams the mansion has been made much, much smaller — it’s a grand total of sixteen screens — and it’s got more or less the same layout in each one, meaning you can learn the spatial element of the game very quickly. This stands in stark contrast to Maniac Mansion’s messy sprawl, or even a more recent attempt like Monkey Island 2 which spreads the action out over multiple locations on three different islands — Day Of The Tentacle is, ironically, a much more logically organised game, where all you really need to worry about is figuring out the solutions to its cause-and-effect puzzles.

Even here I think Day Of The Tentacle is quite forgiving. Most of the conventional puzzles are heavily signposted if you just listen to the dialogue — one of the categories for the Human Competition is Best Laugh, so you need some way of making Dead Cousin Ted laugh. The inflatable clown Oozo laughs sarcastically every time he hits you, and it doesn’t take a huge amount of brainpower to figure out that the two are related somehow; all it then requires is figuring out which item will let you extract Oozo’s voice box, and that is a problem that’s entirely solvable using real-world logic. The puzzles based around accomplishing something in the past to change something in the future are a little more complex, but even here the game drops some very heavy hints. In general if something is present in two different time periods there’s some way of using it to transport an item between the two; for example, the washer-dryer exists in the present and the future version of the mansion, and you have in your inventory a sweater that is explicitly stated to be soaking wet the moment you pick it up as an additional hint, so it’s just a matter of sticking the sweater inside the dryer and finding enough quarters to keep it going for a hundred years. That last part is where things really do start to veer into the cartoonish, but once you have your giant pile of quarters there are only two things in the game you can potentially use it on and one of them won’t let you, so you can at least predict the correct interaction even if the usefulness of the outcome isn’t immediately clear.

Still, I can’t deny that Day Of The Tentacle has a little more scope for being confusing and frustrating than, say, the first half of Monkey Island; it can’t quite match that paradigm of consistent internal logic despite Monkey Island being almost as absurd and Day Of The Tentacle deploying a few of the same tricks to try and keep things legible. Hoagie’s adventures in the past have the same kind of deliberately anachronistic energy as he torments the signers of the Declaration of Independence with joke teeth, exploding cigars and a fake fire alarm, while Bernard is trapped in the extremely relatable³ personal hell of a hotel that’s in the middle of holding a convention. Laverne’s jaunt into the future is where the game wobbles very slightly; I feel like the designers knew it too because she spends the first half of the game stuck in a tree and then has to overcome the further obstacle of making a tentacle disguise before she can achieve anything meaningful. This feels like it’s trying to hide the fact that the future is much less elaborate than the other two time periods — or at least, most of the puzzles in it are solved by doing stuff in the other two time periods, and so Laverne has the least amount of work to do. This is probably a good thing as the future is where things do start to tread on the wrong side of the “cartoon logic” line, with a couple of rather unpredictable outcomes like what happens when you push the mummy out of his room, or when you toss the cat into the prisoners’ cell, and so Laverne’s gameplay being mercifully brief in comparison to Hoagie and Bernard at least ensures it doesn’t outstay its welcome.

The thing that surprises me most about Day Of The Tentacle after all of these years, though, is that it is funny. This is hardly a first for a LucasArts adventure game, which have all attempted to be funny with varying degrees of success — Monkey Island is masterful, Zack McKraken is painful, and Loom’s wisecracking protagonist just came off as an asshole — but what stands out about Day Of The Tentacle is that out of all of the ones I’ve played so far it’s the most overtly humorous, and arguably the most successful. I think the overall joke quality in Monkey Island is higher, but DOTT makes up for it with volume; nearly every single line in the game is either a joke or the setup for one, to the point where the plot is essentially an afterthought. That’s not to say that it’s irrelevant, since while the game might be light-hearted nonsense your goals are always clear (in fact Dr Fred explicitly lists them during the intro sequence), and that’s quite important for preventing DOTT from becoming a confusing mess like Zak McKraken or (as a sneak preview of what’s coming next) Sam & Max Hit The Road. Instead, DOTT manages to thread the needle of being confident enough to be funny without trying too hard and subverting its own internal structure in the process — this is all the more impressive because I have a longstanding hatred of humour that involves either of the words “wacky” or “zany” in its description, and at first glance DOTT appears to fall squarely into those categories.  The thing is, though, while DOTT might be an absurd game, it is also a clever one. If it was all cartoon effects and fourth-wall breaking humour it’d be dangerously close to insufferable,but the core of the time-travelling puzzles balances things out nicely and it’s smart enough not to let the jokes get so out of hand that they suffocate the game.

I am conscious of my own bias here; perhaps that’s the nostalgia talking, and perhaps somebody coming into Day Of The Tentacle for the first time in 2021 would find the game insufferable. My bar for that is higher than most people’s, though, and while playing through DOTT as number eight of a twelve-part series of adventure games did expose a few rough edges that I previously wouldn’t have noticed, it still holds up remarkably well today. I think my replay of the first Monkey Island did enough to raise my opinion of that game that it’s sitting on the same level as DOTT in my head, now — I will probably not be quite so blase about throwing around phrases like “greatest adventure game ever made” when talking about DOTT without putting some sort of qualifier in front of it, anyway –  but my replay of DOTT didn’t diminish my opinion of DOTT at all. It’s still an all-time classic.

The post LucasArts Time Machine: Day Of The Tentacle appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

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.

This is a potentially dangerous thing for Double Fine to be doing for several reasons. The first, and biggest, is that previous remasters of classic Lucasarts adventure games have sucked, or at least weren’t very good. The first Monkey Island remaster was a disaster, with art that was uglier than the twenty year-old original and voice actors who (Dominic Armato aside) had absolutely no grasp of that exotic concept of “comic timing”, which is something of an issue when you’re making a comedy adventure game about pirates. The second Monkey Island remaster was something of an improvement on the art front but also carried over many of the issues from the first one, with its main legacy being a soundtrack that, while not exactly better than the original, could at least sit alongside it as a sort of alternative mix. Finally you have Grim Fandango, which took a much wiser approach of mostly leaving the original assets untouched save for touching up the graphics and the interface a little, but which was hamstrung by Grim Fandango not being a very good adventure game¹. It’s not exactly an area in which developers have a strong track record of success. Then you’ve got the second reason, which I appreciate is going to be rather specific to me: I think Day Of The Tentacle is the best adventure game ever made to the point where I do literally have the entire game memorised (save for bits and pieces of Laverne’s era), and so I’m going to give very short shrift to any inadequacies thrown up by ill-advised changes that are part of a remaster.

Fortunately Double Fine have used the same light touch here that they did with the Grim Fandango remaster. They’re helped along significantly by DOTT already being fully-voiced back in 1993 (with comic timing thankfully intact) so they don’t have to record new dialogue for a whole game and can avoid the potential pitfalls that the Monkey Island remasters blundered into so enthusiastically; all they have to do there is sharpen up the audio. The music must have been a bit trickier for them as they’ve redone all of it; however it’s been done so that it preserves the spirit of the original MIDI tracks (in other words they’ve not gone and brought in a full orchestra to do it just because they can) and also — crucially — in a way that appears to be compatible with the dynamic iMUSE behaviour of classic Lucasarts titles, where the music would segue seamlessly from one track to another as you transitioned from screen to screen. This is something that the Monkey Island remasters also fell down quite badly on, as even MI2’s soundtrack couldn’t quite replicate that smooth transition. iMUSE was very subtle, but it was an absolutely critical element of the irreplaceable sense of atmosphere that the Lucasarts adventures games all shared, and I’m extremely happy that DOTT Remastered gets it right.

The visuals are potentially a thornier area to tackle. “All” Double Fine have done here is smooth up all of those pixelated edges on the original art, make the game widescreen and relegate the inventory to a pop-up tab so that it’s not taking up the the bottom third of the screen. The additional art required to make the game widescreen (in some places they’ve had to draw extra bits on each side of the screen to make it fit properly) are so seamless I didn’t even notice them, so no issues there. Banishing the inventory to a pop-up tab isn’t the most elegant thing they could have done — admittedly I’m struggling to think of a better way of doing it so I feel a bit awkward making this criticism, but it did feel rather hamhanded to have to manually bring up the inventory every time I wanted to use an item —  but Double Fine have at least done what the MI remasters didn’t and preserved the original inventory structure and icons, ensuring that visual jokes like the ever-evolving state of the hamster make it across into the remaster intact. If you don’t like this then they’ve provided the option to play the game with the new art but using the old verb-based UI, although you have to sacrifice the widescreen visuals in order to do this. Still, it’s a pretty admirable attempt to provide the best of both worlds.

Those smoothed edges, though. I’m in two minds about this. On the one hand I feel like most attempts to improve visuals in remastered games are driven by a misguided assumption that older art automatically equals worse art thanks to the technical restrictions of computers at the time. This isn’t always true, and for the Lucasarts adventures it’s particularly untrue; those games had pixel art that hinted at what wasn’t there in a masterful way, and neither of the Monkey Island remasters managed to better the pixelated renderings of Steve Purcell’s original hand-drawn backgrounds despite having a twenty year advantage. Talent tends to shine through no matter what the medium, and so redoing art is only a good idea if you’re sure the studio doing the remaster has an artist on staff who is that talented².

On the other hand the stylised art of DOTT is clearly supposed to look like an early 90s cartoon, and I haven’t seen any cartoons from back then that purposely sprinkled their visuals with pixels. Removing them is therefore moving the visuals closer to what they were intended to be in the first place, and while it looks a bit weird to begin with you quickly get used to it. Yes, it does bear more than a passing resemblance to a Flash cartoon now, but that’s the point. And yes, if you have an existing copy of DOTT ScummVM and DOSbox will automatically do a similar smoothing for you without having to pay £11 for a remastered copy, but it doesn’t look anywhere near as good as the work that’s been done here. The key thing is that it’s still recognisably DOTT, and the only real shortcoming of this approach is that the original animation frames have been preserved and look a little rough and jarring when everything else has been smoothed out. Doubtless this is to make it a little easier for the now obligatory F1 switch that flips between the classic and remastered versions of DOTT on the fly, so even if you really hate all of the changes you can still enjoy the original game in all of its SCUMMy glory.

That’s about it for the remaster; there’s a bundled developer commentary that I haven’t listened to and a bunch of concept art that’s basically “Here’s what all of the backgrounds looked like before we put them in game”, but as far as the actual game goes the changes are pretty subtle and hands-off as I said earlier. As for DOTT itself, I’m not going to waste your time or mine explaining it; it’s a twenty-three year old game that you’re probably aware of if you have any interest in the medium, and if you aren’t aware of it then I would urge you to try it out ASAP. I wrote a little skit on it a few years back and as far as I am concerned it is pretty much timeless — something that no doubt has ensured this remaster’s high level of quality, as there wasn’t actually a huge amount that Double Fine needed to do here to remaster it in the first place. As with Grim Fandango they’ve shown a rare awareness that they don’t need to make changes for the sake of it, and have instead let the game speak for itself by only doing what is necessary to update it for the 21st century. In Grim Fandango’s case I found what it had to say incredibly annoying, but it gives DOTT a second chance to shine. And I’m all for that.

The post Thoughts: Day Of The Tentacle Remastered appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

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?

00:05 – Good lord, I’d forgotten quite how excellent the art for DOTT is. It looks a little pixelated, sure, and I’m not sure if ScummVM is doing any post-processing to smoothen up the visuals like DOSBox does, but on the whole the cartoon style of the game has aged remarkably well.

00:07 — Okay, that’s the (excellent) intro and opening credits over and done with. Time to see how much of this game I can do from memory. Which could be tricky seeing as how DOTT is essentially three separate adventure games running in parallel and my inherent dislike of Laverne’s portion of the game means I can only remember how to win the human beauty contest. I’ll just have to hope I can pick things up as I go along.

00:08 — The item harvesting portion of the game. Any basic strategy for tackling an adventure game starts with picking up as many things as possible and stuffing them into your pockets; in my case it’s rather helpful since it jogs my memory for a lot of upcoming puzzles. DOTT is a little unusual in that it throws nearly all of the items you need to get through the first two thirds of the game at you right from the start.The Help Wanted sign from the front of the motel, the dime from the change slot of the payphone, the two jugs of coffee and the funnel, the red paint, the bucket of water and brush, the wine that needs to be turned into vinegar; all of this stuff and more can be swiped by Bernard and Hoagie right off the bat. Of course, with DOTT the process of actually using them to do something is a little more complicated as you first have to figure out which timestream (or timestreams) a given item will be useful in, and then send it there.

00:30 — This horse. This horse is going to end up plaguing me, I know it. I can never figure out how to get his teeth off of him. I’ll come back to him later. At least the puzzle with Jed and Ned Edison is easy, and DOTT is very good about showing you what you’ve changed in the future thanks to your actions in the past via cutscenes.

00:33 — Immediately switch back to Bernard so that I can push the old lady down the stairs. I love this part.

00:34 — And then hop across the corridor to visit Weird Ed Edison and his stamp collection. The computer in here plays the original Maniac Mansion if you use it. I never have because — whisper it — the original Maniac Mansion wasn’t that good to begin with and has dated terribly. Both the stamp and the hamster are collected and the hamster is immediately stuffed into a nearby ice box. This is just the first of many indignities this hamster is going to have to suffer, but the game plays the joke to the hilt with ever changing pictures and descriptions of the hamster in the inventory. One of the reasons I think modern adventure games (and especially the Monkey Island remakes) fall down a bit is that this avenue of simple visual humour is closed off to them in favour of a more streamlined UI that’s often more awkward for the player to use, not less.

00:40 — Is it bad that everything I know about the formation of the United States I learned from Day of the Tentacle? Like, if you asked me to summarise everything I know about George Washington the list would look something like this:

• Was first president of the United States.
• Liked cutting down cherry trees.

I don’t even know if the second one is accurate or not, but it’s in my head now thanks to this bizarre cultural osmosis. It’s odd that this specifically American humour translates across the Atlantic divide so well, but Lucasarts wisely stuck to the broadest, most popularly known facts and anecdotes about the historical figures in question. And then took the piss out of them. Which is why even twelve year old me got the jokes about Betsy Ross making the flag and Ben Franklin flying his kite. Hoagie’s irreverent tone works well with the situation too; I suspect the writers took more than a little bit of inspiration from Bill and Ted.

Unfortunately at this point I get George to chop down the cherry tree which — sigh — means I have to start dealing with Laverne and the future portion of the game, which requires you to do one of the worst designed puzzles in the game in order to get anywhere interesting and which I’ll be putting off as long as possible. At least I get her scalpel now, which means I can do this.

1:03 — I really hate that clown.

1:05 – The videotape puzzle to get Doctor Fred’s safe combination is a bit trial and error, but there’s a fantastic little touch at the end where the IRS men come in to take him away. Because you’re viewing the video in slow motion to get the combination, the speech of the IRS agent is also slowed down and — awesomely — they’ve actually gotten the voice actor to rerecord his dialogue speaking only one. word. at. a. time. very. slowly.

1:12 – No, Laverne still sucks. Let’s do some more Bernard for a bit.

1:20 — Swapping Doctor Fred for Dead Cousin Ted holds me up for five minutes or so as the IRS men keep hearing me and swapping them back again. Then I realise I can use the red paint I used to make the kumquat tree look like a cherry tree back in Hoagie’s time period to also make the mummy look like he’s bound up in red tape too (the humour in this game can be very literal at times). I think this is the only item in the game which is used twice in two different time periods, which is why it gave me a bit of trouble.

1:27 — Yeah okay, it’s time for me to start dealing with Laverne. The reason I hate the puzzle she starts off with is that it involves so much tedious repetition. First you have to pretend to be ill so that you can swipe the tentacle anatomy diagram from the wall of the doctor’s office. Then you have to say you need to use the bathroom so that you can send the diagram back in time to Hoagie. Hoagie gives the diagram to Betsy Ross, and the American flag flying from the motel in the future turns into a tentacle disguise. But Laverne needs to get up to the top of the motel to get it, which means pretending she’s ill to get into the doctor’s office again so that she can scurry up the chimney from there. If you forget to get the crank from Hoagie before doing this it’s a wasted trip; you need to use the bathroom again, get the crank from the Chron-o-John, pretend to be ill for a third time, and then lower the “flag” to the point where Laverne can grab it and put it on. There’s so much back and forthing here and it takes a minute each time. It’s not hard to figure out, just immensely tedious and time-consuming.

1:40 — Oh well, now that that’s over and done with I can at least start doing the good part of Laverne’s time period: the human beauty contest. This is a great and funny puzzle with a payoff that makes no sense whatsoever (you’re trying to win a dinner certificate so that you can give it to the guard in the human kennel so that he’ll leave it unattended so that you can frighten the inmates into escaping and drawing off the tentacle standing guard outside the lab entrance) but it’s miles better than what I just went through, so I’ll just run with it. Unfortunately this requires a number of items: spaghetti noodles for the mummy’s hair, Oozo’s voice box for his laugh; and the horse’s teeth.

I still don’t have the horse’s teeth.

1:49 — Yep, I give up. I don’t want to do the usual adventure game tactic of last resort of using every single item I have on the horse, especially since the items are scattered across three different time periods. So I figure what the hey, I’ve already completed this game like four or five times already, I can afford to look at a walkthrough without feeling like I’ve copped out here at all.

1:50 – Really? Really? It’s the goddamn science textbook Bernard starts with that you immediately forget about because you never physically picked it up from anywhere? This game has great humour and many good puzzles, but some of them are also completely wack.

1:55 — While I’m here I get Hoagie to give all the items needed for the patented super-battery required to power his Chron-o-John to Doctor Red Edison, which is then charged up by being stuck inside Ben Franklin’s kite during a thunderstorm. That’s Hoagie done.

2:05 — I also finish off Bernard by getting Doctor Fred to sign the job contract from the safe, getting Hoagie to mail it in the past using Weird Ed Edison’s stamp, and then using the proceeds to buy a mail-order diamond to make the time machine in the present work. These puzzles seem to flow quite naturally despite involving the headfuckery of time travel which puts them in stark contrast to the two described above. Maybe that’s just because I can remember them better than the other ones, though.

2:17 – With one suitably outfitted mummy in tow — and after removing Harold from the contest through nefarious means — Laverne wins the beauty contest, gets the food certificate and does all that stuff I said. Now she can get to Doctor Fred’s old basement lab to plug her Chron-o-John into the hamster power generator. This, naturally, means more hamster abuse.

First she has to retrieve the hamster from his 200 year cryogenic suspension in the ice box and thaw him out in the microwave (which is acknowledged to be a really bad idea and something you really shouldn’t try at home, kids). Unfortunately this leaves behind a shivering wet and cold hamster who is in no condition to power anything, so it’s a good thing I got Bernard to put a sweater into the motel’s dryer back in the present along with 200 years’ worth of dimes, really. Putting the shrunken sweater onto the hamster results in a toasty warm hamster who is all ready to run on the wheel powering the generator — or at least he would, if he didn’t take advantage of a distraction to run and hide in a mouse hole the minute Laverne lets him loose. Forward planning saves the day yet again; Hoagie slipped a sales pamphlet for vacuum cleaners into the Constitution suggestion box in the past that stipulated every American should have a vacuum cleaner in their basement, and so one magically appears there in the future as decreed by law. Laverne uses the vacuum cleaner to retreive the now rather dusty hamster from the hole, and this time he plays ball and powers her Chron-o-John. This is probably the best puzzle in the game as it requires doing stuff in all three timestreams that makes perfect sense according to the game’s twisted cartoon logic.

2:31 — Time for the end game! Sadly this is the part where adventure game convention dictates you’re stripped of all your items and everything runs along rails, and while DOTT’s finale is amusing it’s hardly taxing on the brain. Suffice to say that Purple Tentacle’s plan for world domination is defeated and everything goes back to normal.

Well, mostly normal, anyway. Just over two and a half hours and my nostalgia for the game was only slightly blunted by it relying on Adventure Game Logic rather more heavily than I remembered. Day of the Tentacle benefits greatly from being part of the last wave of 2D adventure games as its art has aged far more gracefully than (for example) Monkey Island’s, and as for the humour it’s absurdist take on both history and the future means it’s just as funny today. It’s merely some of the puzzles which seem rather anachronistic in the convoluted logical leaps required to solve them, but as long as you aren’t too proud to glance at a walkthrough every now and then this needn’t be a problem. I have a theory that adventure games are more about writing and humour than they are puzzles, and Day of the Tentacle bears this out rather well as far as I’m concerned. It’s still a classic.

The post In Praise Of: Day Of The Tentacle. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.