OK, I realize that I should probably use this feature as a weekly oasis away from the month-long retro game rush that is May 2017 for me, but this scenario seemed too perfect to avoid. The remastered version of Day of the Tentacle was released last year as part of Double Fine's ongoing process of buying the rights to Tim Schafer's LucasFilm oeuvre (I use that word way too much. Oeuvreuse it, you probably wouldn't say) and upgrading them both graphically and mechanically for the modern age. I wrote about another failed attempt to get into Grim Fandango when it got remastered a few years back, and the hubbub around the recent Full Throttle remake got me hankering for some classic LucasFilm point-and-click goodness. I am definitely going to burn out whatever moon logic node of the brain is necessary for solving all these obtuse 90s graphic adventure game puzzles before the month is out, but darn it no-one should need an excuse to boot up an even better version of Day of the Tentacle and spend a few minutes trying to remember how to get the fake vomit off the lobby ceiling of Dr. Fred Edison's mixed-up (and, quite possibly, maniac) mansion. (You use Green Tentacle's amp after pushing it onto the floor, I know. Way ahead of ya.)

I'll rewind a bit, for the sake of those who don't know what this game is. Back in 1989, Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick created the first adventure game for LucasFilm that wasn't based on Labyrinth: Maniac Mansion. The game development branch of LucasFilm were testing the waters of this medium with their early efforts, many of which were Star Wars-like if not necessarily Star Wars, and Maniac Mansion was one of the first cases of the company creating a voice distinct from the movies that made its namesake director a household name. In fact, it's due to the likes of Gilbert and later Schafer that we associate LucasFilm (later LucasArts) with a sort of irreverent B-movie sensibility: whether it's the goofy pirates of Secret of Monkey Island, the mind-bending sci-fi of Zak McKracken, the ravenous cartoon undead of Zombies Ate My Neighbors or the Looney Tunes-filtered noir of Sam & Max: Hit the Road. It would eventually (and perhaps inevitably) become Star Wars all day every day for LucasArts until its eventual demise, but during those early frontier times it was an exciting studio to watch. Especially for adventure game fans. Maniac Mansion began a chain of some of the best graphic adventure games ever to be devised, combining brilliant quality-of-life gameplay innovations ("life" being the operative word, as many LucasFilm adventure games didn't come with any kind of game over state) as well as sharply written and usually hilarious scripts. When Schafer and fellow designer/writer Dave Grossman were given the unenviable task of following Maniac Mansion with another shaggy dog tale about mutant creatures taking over the world and three young heroes working separately to foil those plans, they knocked it out of the park with the superior Day of the Tentacle.

This remaster isn't really just for us old people who need an excuse to replay a great game that's creeping up on its 25th anniversary (good lord, I wish I hadn't just written that) but a way to make a valuable game - both historically and in an evergreen sense - accessible to a larger audience with all the modern quality-of-life upgrades to which they have become accustomed. I can say with some four hours on the clock and over 50% of the game's puzzles complete that this is the best way to play one of the best adventure games ever made. I can't recall how many of these features were in the original (it's been over two decades since my last playthrough), but this version of the game includes: cutscene and dialogue skipping, a button to highlight all hotspots on a screen (which isn't much of an issue with DotT, since its cartoonishly huge sprites mitigated much of the "pixel hunt" problem), a means to instantly pass items to other characters without marching back to the "Chron-O-John" time-travel toilets, a streamlined version of the original's game wall of verbs to employ, and a larger playing window and sharper graphics that make it far easier to tell where everything is (or what everything is, for that matter). I'm still getting stuck on puzzles I can only half-remember too, so I'm glad my failing memory has allowed me play this game relatively fresh again.

I'll admit that this edition of Indie Game of the Week was less a public service and more me taking a vacation. That's fine. We could all use those from time to time.

Rating: 5 out of 5.