Maniac Mansion: Day of the Tentacle
As sort of a late PC gaming bloomer, having been raised a dirty little console kid, by the time I had experienced my first taste of PC gaming in 1995 I had already missed this brilliant gem. Released two years earlier by Lucasarts, this was my second foray into the point & click adventure genre popularized by the company, and despite almost two years of advancement in both graphics and interface, the charm and laugh-out-loud comedy of Day of the Tentacle still shown through, ensuring that it was, and still is, the best example of its genre.
Day of the Tentacle plays as traditional a point and click adventure as you can get, essentially a semi-linear series of puzzles that the user must solve in order to progress through the game. With no time limit or penalty of death, the game takes a blissful leisurely pace allowing the player to solve these puzzles in their own time. Since the player can shift between three separate characters in three unique time zones at will, this leads to some very interesting temporal puzzles which are both deviously clever and amusing satisfying. Using a similar control system as its predecessor Manic Mansion, players direct the characters on-screen by clicking on the two dimensional game world with the mouse and interacting with various objects and other characters through a set of verb commands listed at the bottom of the screen along with an inventory. Objects in your inventory can be examined, combined and used to solve the tasks at hand, and even sent through time to other characters through comical time-travelling toilets! While not as refined or elegant as future implementations, the user interface is still simple and easy enough to use.
Where the real joy of the game comes from is in its story and characters. The world is delightfully twisted and original, as if straight out of a good Tim Burton movie, without a single straight line or dull colour in sight. Each character in the game is equally bent, colourful and downright insane, filling wonderfully exaggerated stereotypes such as nerds, bogans, blond airheads, mad scientists, and various pompous historical figures. They all come together in a delightful nutty plot to save the past, present and future from a crazy purple tentacle thing which has gained both a pair of arms and a desire for world domination from exposure to radioactive waste! Completing the package is the script and voice acting, both which are first rate and side splittingly funny.
I simply can not rate this game high enough. Five stars.
