As a player who bumbled around aimlessly in point-and-click adventures when I was young but has found more enjoyment in them now that I’m (much) older, I was really looking forward to this one. A game from the creators of
Psychonauts and
The Secret of Monkey Island? Sign me up! Yet in games, as in life, not all great expectations are fulfilled, and unfortunately that proved to be the case here.
But hey, let’s start with the positives. The visual design in the remaster is absolutely top notch. I vehemently disagree with the complaints that it looks like a cheap Flash game. The new art is thoroughly modern while remaining faithful to the original, and this is true of both the characters and the backgrounds, all of which meld together in an organic way. Considering I’ve seen other remasters that look like they were slapped together from spare parts, I feel this game’s clean and coherent art design is a major win.
I’m also a big fan of the time travel concept. The puzzles that have you manipulate an object in one time so that you can pick up a modified version in another time are generally well-considered and clever.
It wasn’t all blue water and clear skies, however – the sludge and rain soon became hard to ignore. The biggest letdown for me was the writing, which boils down to “90s Slacker Comedy: The Game.” The farts, burps, and weird characters didn’t hold much appeal to me, though I must admit that I enjoyed my interactions with George Washington and Co. Who knew the Founding Fathers had a suggestion box for the Constitution? The ups and downs in the comedy make me wonder if each part of the game had a different writer.
The story is also notably weak, even by LucasArts standards. After the opening in the mansion, the three characters split up, and the plot stagnates until the end of the game when they reunite. Can a point-and-click adventure get away with a weak story? Well, The Secret of Monkey Island isn’t going to win any accolades for its plot, but at least it has a feeling of forward progression. I would’ve appreciated more of that feeling here.
The dearth of story beats is a side effect of the non-linear puzzle progression. (Or am I confusing cause for effect?) In any case, the fact that you can do many puzzles in any order is both a blessing and a curse. In the early game it feels inviting to have so much to explore and so many puzzles to grind away at. But the converse of this is that when you get stuck, the number of potential solutions to a given puzzle is extremely vast. Making matters worse is that passing objects between eras is cumbersome and can only be done in one specific location (with a few exceptions). These factors result in puzzles that can take hours to crack if you try to brute force them, and I must admit that I turned to the game’s guide on The Universal Hint System towards the end because my patience was growing thin.
[Edit: I later learned that you can move objects between characters by clicking and dragging within the UI. Knowing this would've lessened my frustrations, I'm sure. Maybe next life!]
As the product of two first-time directors in Tim Schafer and Dave Grossman, Day of the Tentacle is competent. But it matches neither the Ron Gilbert-led games that came before it, nor the later games of its own creators. Is it still worth a play today? Most definitely! Just be sure to approach it with tempered expectations.