Day of the Tentacle Remastered (2016) - Review

Deciding to revisit some childhood memories by replaying old Point & Click (P&C) Adventure games with my kids has turned out to be a blessing and a curse. I'm always happy to see them enjoy "real" games, as I like to think of anything that isn't just clicking and combining random stuff (wait a minute, that describes the average P&C game).

But it turns out they enjoy them a lot more than I expected them to. Maybe more than I ever did when I originally played them, probably fueled by the fact that we get to complete the games unlike what I managed on my ownsome. Especially my 6yo daughter loves the experience of sitting together and trying to figure out the puzzles. Now she nags me every day for us to play some more. A blessing and a curse.

Unlike my memories of Secret of Monkey Island, I remember clearly not getting very far into Day of the Tentacle as a kid. Having replayed it now as an adult, I really can't blame my child-self for failing at this. Day of the Tentacle epitomizes everything that I worry about when playing a P&C game i.e the puzzles being obscure to the point of almost being impossible to solve. Day of the Tentacle requires some next level out-of-the-box-thinking to finish without a guide and there are puzzles in there that will haunt me forever. Oh and just a warning here, I will give some examples of these puzzles so if you haven't played the game and don't want any tips, beware.

Day of the Tentacle is technically a sequel to Maniac Mansion, a game I have never played. Fortunately it only vaguely references that game (at least to my knowledge) and it doesn't feel like you need to know anything about Maniac Mansion to fully enjoy this game. Because even though Day of the Tentacle is a P&C game that is hard as nails, it is very fun and probably one of the best examples of the comedy from writers Tim Schafer, Dave Grossman and Ron Gilbert who also made the beforementioned Monkey Island game and the sequel to that.

The original Day of the Tentacle was released in 1993 and the remastered version adds some updated graphics and a very enjoyable commentary track that runs throughout the game as you play it. This style of updated graphics worked so much better than the one they used in The Secret of Monkey Island, as they've basically kept the original style but smoothed out the pixelated edges which makes things a bit easier to see.

You control friends Bernard, Hoagie and Laverne as they get thrown across time to stop the evil purple tentacle from taking over the world. Hoagie gets stuck 200 years in the past and Laverne 200 years in the future, while Bernard stays in the present. A big part of the gameplay is adjusting the timeline so that whatever Hoagie does in the past changes conditions in Bernard's or Laverne's timeline. This is a very fun concept and used brilliantly throughout the game, it also ups the ante for your guesses on how to solve different problems. One of my favorites is when Bernard puts a sweater in the tumble dryer for 200 years so that when Laverne gets it in the future she can use it to warm up a hamster that has been frozen for 200 years. 

The controls are the good old SCUMM controls with the option to use different verbs with different objects in your surroundings, verbs like "push", "open" or "pick up". In the remastered version you get a wheel of options that works very well, much better than solution they went with in the remastered version of the Secret of Monkey Island.

When I played it as a kid I never got further than getting Laverne out of the tree. Finally getting to play through the game properly was exciting and fun. I remembered some puzzles in the beginning but very quickly we got stuck and we pretty much had to use a walkthrough for 80% of the puzzles in the latter 3/4 of the game. 

Like any good game, a good P&C game needs both a good story and good gameplay. Day of the Tentacle delivers. I usually get annoyed when I constantly have to consult a walkthrough, but the characters and the story of Day of the Tentacle kept me curious and I didn't mind checking lists. 

But how hard are the puzzles anyway, you might wonder? Let me give you one example...

*deep breath* In the future, Laverne needs a tentacle to move from the place he is guarding. To make him move she needs to make him chase after some humans. To let the humans out of the prison you need to remove the prison guard. To remove the prison guard you need to give him a dinner invite. To get the dinner invite you need to win the human exhibition contest. But Laverne has no human to compete with. So you get a mummy in an upstairs room and put roller skaters on him so you can roll him around. You also need a name tag that you get from one of the other guys. Then you need Hoagie to send you pasta that he finds in a cupboard, use it as hair on the mummy and comb it with a fork. All this is to win one of the three competitions needed.

There are definitely puzzles in this game I would've never been able to figure out or even guess at.  Maybe not even figure out with the old and tried tactic of just combining everything in your inventory with everything you see. Since you play as three different characters, in three different setting and with three different inventories, it just makes the variables so much larger. I don't feel dumb playing this game, I just accept the whackiness of it.

But fortunately everything else about the game is so well done and written, you forgive it and you want to continue trying. I definitely did as a kid, I threw myself at the problems many, many times and I even managed to figure out that you needed to paint the Kumquat tree fruits red so that Washington will think it's a cherry tree and chop it down, meaning it disappears in the future and Laverne falls down.

But then I couldn't figure out that Laverne needs to send the diagram of a tentacle to Hoagie so that he can give it to the woman who creates the American flag, turning a flag in Laverne's timeline into a tentacle costume so that she can move around freely. Yeah... I never got past that part. Until now.

If you tell me you've played through Day of the Tentacle entirely without help, you have my eternal respect. It is probably the most difficult P&C game I have played, simply because of the somewhat random and jokey nature of the puzzles.

But the game is full of memorable characters and gaming moments that will make it worth your time and frustration. The game manages to stump you but make it all the more rewarding when you figure something out. It deserves its place as one of P&C games finest, especially considering when it was released. There have been many good P&C games since then, but few as fun and funny as this one.