Welcome to the first "Outro" of May Maturity this year. I'd have liked for this to show up earlier in the week, but between my hard-headed stubbornness to look up solutions and the couple of days it took to complete Song of the Deep (the Indie Game of the Week), I spent most of the seven day limit to reach the end of Burst Studios's excellent graphic adventure game Toonstruck. (My accompanying "Intro" to this game can be found yonder.)

Since I don't want to get into any spoilers for the story or the puzzles, which leaves little else to discuss, I want instead to focus on Toonstruck's unusual structure (struckture?), and how it is both the game's most remarkable and most unfortunate aspect. Remarkable because the game's pacing is built in such a way that you spend the majority of the entire game's runtime looking for eleven objects that fit a specific criteria, and then a smaller minority towards the end trapped in a single immense location trying to find a way out. The second part is enhanced by its singular focus, while the scavenger hunt aspect is more open-ended and has you pursuing multiple puzzle "threads" simultaneously. Each of the items you need to complete the "Cutifier" device for the jubilant King Hugh has their own chain of puzzles to solve before you can acquire them, and some are even needed to procure others. This approach means you're less likely to spend a long time stuck - having lots of goals at once lets you diversify if one in particular is stymieing you - but as you continue to unlock new areas and fill your inventory with all sorts of objects of appreciable value, it becomes that much harder to figure out what needs to be used where. Hence the "unfortunate". To reiterate, we're talking the lion's share of the game's runtime here, incidentally, which covers about thirty screens and almost as many NPCs to interact with.

To be fair, this isn't an uncommon issue with the older graphic adventure games. In fact, for the longest time it was the de facto standard. As you got further in the game, you would inevitably solve puzzles that involved removing obstacles blocking you from new regions. Early on in Toonstruck, this includes a hungry wolf blocking the way to the sinister Malevolands and an elaborate but currently non-operational elephant-powered cable car that transports people to the madcap land of Zanydu - figuring out a way past either of these barriers opened a huge amount of new locations to visit, increasing the number of puzzle variables to work with. It also follows that you'd eventually accumulate a huge amount of junk you couldn't get rid of for whatever reason, and the developers presumably felt that, were you to lose something, there would need to be justification for it. If you have a pot of glue and use it on a couple of hotspots, it would be logical to assume that you used it all up, thus explaining why you no longer had it in your inventory. A giant mallet? Well, you'd have to actively throw that away, or the developers would need to conceive of an explanation for why it would suddenly leave your inventory beyond an arbitrary "when I fell into that pit, half of my stuff got broken!" type of transition. Frankly, minimizing the number of moving parts to worry about is preferable, in my view, to worrying about the deleterious affect on my immersion caused by some overly contrived reason to toss away all the items I no longer need between chapters, but I can appreciate that not everyone shares that sentiment.

Beyond the strange way the game is paced, there's little I can find to fault it. Sure, there are bugs here and there, and there's a few cases of the dreaded pixel hunt (there's a sink in one part of the game that has faucets as well as one of those plug-closing levers, which can be tricky to make out) but I managed to get to the end of the game without cheating. Took a while, of course, but then I can be too obstinate for my own good sometimes. The game has the right balance of humor between the dumb puns and all the slapstick along with the slightly more clever meta jokes, using the player's familiarity of cartoon tropes to clue them into possible solutions. Its visual style is highly reminiscent of the animation history it homages, as well as little touches like that great adventure game thing of using foreground objects around the screen's periphery to make a scene feel more "genuine". The voice acting is top-notch - as well as Christopher Lloyd in the main role, you have the likes of Tim Curry and Dom DeLuise as well as a gaggle of veteran cartoon voiceover artists like Tress McNeille, the ubiquitous "fussy/old woman" voice of Futurama and many other shows, The Simpsons's Dan Castellaneta, or the ubiquitous Frank Welker - and so is the music, which draws from many famous cartoon classical music leitmotifs like Gioacchino Rossini's "Thieving Magpie Overture" or Sidney Crooke's "The March of the Ants" (frequently heard in Ren & Stimpy).

I've read up on Toonstruck's history a little more after completing it, and it sounds like the game's abrupt ending was due to running out of time and/or resources to reach a more fitting conclusion to the game. The leftover material was going to be reworked into a sequel that, evidently, never transpired. Fans have been working non-stop to make it happen regardless, and at this point I wholeheartedly support their efforts. Maybe its semi-recent inclusion on Steam and GOG - which finally allowed me to catch up, along with no doubt many others - will inspire even greater interest in a follow-up.

That's Toonstruck, and it's the first item on the May Maturity hit list taken down. Stay tooned for another "Intro" in the coming days, as we move... deeper underground?

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