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Studio: |
LucasArts |
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Designer(s): |
Dave
Grossman / Tim Schafer |
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Part of series: |
Maniac
Mansion |
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Release: |
June 25, 1993 (original) / March 22, 2016 (remake) |
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Main credits: |
Programming: Jonathan Ackley, Ron
Baldwin, Dave Grossman, Tim Schafer Music: Clint Bajakian, Peter McConnell, Michael
Land |
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Useful links: |
Complete
playthrough, parts 1-5 (5 hours) |
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It is a little unfortunate, in my
opinion, that Day Of The Tentacle
was designed as a sequel to Maniac
Mansion, rather than a completely stand-alone title. Essentially, it
means that without playing Maniac
Mansion first, the player is bound to be somewhat confused by the opening
of the game — who are these green and purple tentacles? how and why are they
connected to that bunch of kids? what sort of history does Bernard have with
the proverbial «mansion»? etc. — not to mention that all the tribulations of
the Edison family work best if you know the backstory. Yet recommending that each player complete
Maniac Mansion first (subtly hinted
at by the designers, who went so far as to include the original title as a
game-within-a-game — see below) is fairly harsh, because while Day Of The Tentacle, especially in its
remastered form, is perfectly playable by anybody even in this day and age, Maniac Mansion remains a museum piece
with outdated graphics and no sound, playable only by game historians and
truly dedicated aficionados. This is particularly unfortunate
because in every other respect, Day Of
The Tentacle is not really a «sequel», but a fully autonomous enterprise.
It was designed not by Maniac Mansion’s
original creators, but by the Monkey
Island co-designers Dave Grossman and Tim Schafer, who first worked with
Ron Gilbert, then took over his duties after his departure from LucasArts —
even though one of Ron’s earlier concepts (involving time travel) was indeed
chosen as the basis for the game’s storyline. The game involves a completely
different roster of playable characters (except for Bernard, who still goes
through a complete character transformation, from a forgettable and interchangeable
nerdy sidekick in Maniac Mansion to
a fully fleshed-out, personality-endowed hero in Day Of The Tentacle). The story itself has few, if any, ties to
the plotline of Maniac Mansion. And
in terms of puzzle design, world-building, story intricacy, witty and funny
dialog, music, voices, and graphics, Day
Of The Tentacle blows its predecessor out of the water — even taking into
account the predictable raising of standards from 1988 to 1993, the boys did
such an outstanding job here that, in quite a few aspects, Day Of The Tentacle has yet to be
bettered by any game that followed it... and perhaps it never will. Of course, this unfortunate little
chain link is only a stumbling block for situations where, for instance, you
want to make a point about video games as an art form to somebody who has
never played a video game before. General players will hardly be bothered
with a little confusion (certainly no more so than all those millions of
people playing The Witcher 3
without ever having tried out the first two) — and, in fact, I am pretty sure
that many of the critics who gave glowing reviews to Day Of The Tentacle upon its original release had never
experienced Maniac Mansion (I
almost wanted to write "had not yet been born in the times of Maniac Mansion", but people might
have a hard time understanding that one figuratively). Yet the fact that so many people who
have actually played the game were willing to bestow upon it the title of the
most perfectly designed adventure game of all time — just check all those
Steam or MetaCritic pages — contrasts quite radically with the fact that,
like most LucasArts titles, it was never a big seller (80,000 copies sold in
16 years, according to a report on Wikipedia — compared to, say, 400,000
copies of King’s Quest 6 allegedly
sold on its first week). And this is understandable, because, maybe more so
than any other LucasArts game, Day Of
The Tentacle is the high point of the studio’s hip, post-modern, wildly
absurdist ideology. You do not need to go past the box cover, featuring a
nerdy guy pursued by a giant purple tentacle, to realize that this purchase
is, perhaps, best suited for those looking for "something completely
different". That it was produced at all, by a subdivision of one of the
major film and game companies of its time, is an impressive testament to an
epoch in video gaming the likes of which we will probably never see again. The good news is that,
following Grim Fandango, Day Of The Tentacle would also be
eventually picked up by Tim Schafer’s studio, Double Fine Productions, and,
more than 20 years after its original release, would receive a major
facelift, allowing old fans to refresh their memories and new fans to once
more breathe in that air of liberty from 1993, enhanced by convenient updates
in graphics and interface. The overwhelmingly positive response to the remake
clearly proved that the game hasn’t aged one day — except for, maybe,
carrying over a whiff of that time period’s adorable innocence. |
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Content evaluation |
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In a different age, in a different
environment, in the hands of different... uh, alternately talented people the plot of Day Of The Tentacle, resting on the shoulders of two of the most
tired tropes of existence — «evil monster wants to take over the world» and
«time travel fucks things up» — would have turned into a boring mess.
Actually, the brief introduction sequence, in which Green Tentacle fails to
stop Purple Tentacle for imbibing the radioactive waste flowing into the
river out of Dr. Fred’s laboratory, is
a bit disappointing. It is merely a plot device intended to set things in
motion, but we do not know that yet, and the sheer fact that it is not Ernst
Stavro Blofeld or Emperor Palpatine, but a giant Purple Tentacle thundering
"I FEEL LIKE I COULD TAKE ON THE WORLD!!", is not altogether
reassuring. Anybody familiar with the history of
LucasArts, though, will immediately remember that the studio’s basic
principle is rarely, if ever, to invent entirely new plots, but rather
deconstruct and play with traditional ones in ways that simultaneously mock
their conventions and breathe new life into them. In order to stop Purple
Tentacle from his nefarious activities and ensure the survival of the human
race, our heroes (what heroes? we’ll get to that momentarily) have to go back
in time and prevent his incident rather than neutralize it post-factum. In
the process, due to the fact of Dr. Fred "Stingy" Edison using a
fake diamond instead of a real one, they end up in three different time
periods — the past, the present, and the future — making their task far more
complicated, since now they have to find different ways to power up their
«Chron-o-Johns» (don’t ask) for the return journey; a particularly daunting
challenge for the one stuck in the era of the Constitutional Convention,
though somewhat alleviated by the opportunity of having Ben Franklin sticking
around. The three heroes in question are
Bernard Bernoulli, a nerdy student first introduced in the original Maniac Mansion and now turned
protagonist; Hoagie, an overweight, nihilistic, non-plussed metalhead roadie;
and Laverne, a medical student who’s seemingly breathed in one too many
chemicals. Of these, Bernard is the least interesting character by himself,
more or less a generic blank slate for an inventive nerd — but Hoagie and
Laverne are among the most unforgettable playable characters ever created in
computerland, and, dare I say it, only made possible by the generally whacky
atmosphere of the early software industry. Fortunately for us, the least
interesting character (Bernard) stays in the least interesting time period
(the present), while Hoagie is sent off to remain colorfully unperturbed at
the sights of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, and Laverne is
propelled into the future, where Tentacles have taken over and are now
keeping humans on leashes like the pet poodles they deserve to be. What makes this plot truly outstanding,
however, is not the idea of human history as a gradual evolution from the
Constitutional Convention to the replacement of Homo sapiens by the Tentacle as a dominant species, but the idea
of it as a chain of causes and consequences, one slight tweak at one end of
which will bring on radical changes at the other. Not only do the deeds that
Hoagie and Bernard perform on their end influence the fate of Laverne’s
Tentacle-dominated future, but all three characters can actually use their
stuck Chron-o-Johns to pass objects from one era into another, accelerating
those influences and changes when necessary. This simple, but utterly
unrealistic mechanic could hardly be thought of in a serious sci-fi novel or
movie, but it is perfectly fitting for a video game — and it creates a nearly
limitless sack of possibilities, only a few of which, unfortunately, have
been realized in the actual game (this is not a criticism, though: had
Grossman and Schafer gotten too
carried away with all the fun, the final product would not have shipped
before the dissolution of LucasArts). To be sure, this feels more like a
triumph of algorithmic intellect rather than a showcase of substantial
philosophical depth. There is no strong moral tale told here, and the overall
convoluted web of motifs feels like an outrageous mish-mash of elements from Back To The Future, Planet Of The Apes, and maybe a little
Dr. Strangelove thrown in for good
measure. In other words, Day Of The
Tentacle is still, first and foremost, a LucasArts video game, albeit one
of the very best. But then, complaining about this is a bit like begrudging
the fact that, although the current Olympic champion did set an absolute record for pole vaulting in the history of
mankind, he did not, in fact, clear the Empire State Building. LucasArts
Games were rarely about telling an impressive story; they were always about
breaking the limits for imagination, unpredictability, humor, and
outside-the-box thinking. And in all these matters, Day Of The Tentacle sets such high watermarks that the game still
remains more memorable than many later games with formally more deep and
complex storylines and philosophies. |
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Many of the puzzles designed for Day Of The Tentacle have long since
passed into legend, and for damn good reasons. This is one of the toughest
LucasArts games to beat without a walkthrough (or a hintbook, if you take the
Chron-o-John back to 1993) — because it takes the base mechanic of Maniac Mansion, where you had to think
your way out of any situation by correctly applying the combined talents of
your squad members, and sends it to the next level by separating your squad
members with the sheer factor of time. Even when you get used to the idea that
your characters can communicate with each other through the bowels of a
spacetime-continuum-disrupting portable toilet — even when you actually get
used to that, the necessity to
constantly switch between characters and have them pass to one another a
variety of objects can remain disconcerting for the most meticulous players.
This is rigorously superimposed over the classic LucasArts logic which you
also have to adhere to at all times — the same logic that makes it perfectly
reasonable that not only can a candy machine hold about eight hundred
seventy-six thousand six hundred dollars worth of quarters, but that a single
living person can fit them all in his pants and then quickly insert all of
them into a washing machine to keep it running for the next couple hundred
years. Makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? I would not necessarily agree with the
popular opinion that all, or even most, of Tentacle’s puzzles are exemplary models of perfect puzzle design.
At least one serious flaw is the lack of direct communication between the
characters once they are separated: in order to have one of them help out the
other, he or she must essentially guess
(on some sort of telepathic level?) what the other one might need in the
future or past. This results in weird experiences where sometimes you feel
like you must do something without
clearly understanding what you need it for. Thus, early in the game it is
obvious that you must somehow
convince George Washington to chop down a cherry tree — because the legend
demands it — but it actually takes putting more than two and two together to
understand how this will benefit Laverne in her state of distress. The puzzle
itself is not too difficult, but you have to find some extra internal
motivation to solve it. Later on, things get progressively more
and more complicated, with Laverne truly getting the short end of the stick —
in order to have her mummy win the Best Hair, Best Smile, Best Laugh
competition, she must receive chrono-stream donations from both Hoagie and
Bernard, as well as make some pretty unorthodox grooming decisions on her
own. Top prize, however, goes to the infamous multi-part Hamster Puzzle,
which would take a very large paragraph to describe (a.k.a. spoil) in detail
— suffice it to say that in order to have the little guy powering up the
engine needed to transport Laverne back into the present, nothing works short
of an entire constitutional amendment that will require every American to
keep a vacuum cleaner in their basement (quote John Hancock: "What’s a
vacuum cleaner?"). Although it would be a stretch to call
the three universes of Day Of The
Tentacle an «open world» (most of the action does, in fact, take place
within one and the same mansion in three different chronological states),
many of the puzzles may be performed in pretty random order, depending on
which of your guys you want to focus on first or last. There will always come
a time, though, when you will get hopelessly stuck in one place and be forced
to move on to the next character, and then to the next, and it does require a
pretty neat ordering of your brain — or, at least, of your notepad — to not
get paralyzed in the ocean of possible (and impossible) choices. Of course,
you will not get overwhelmed with pending quests the way it happens in modern
RPGs, but most of the quests in RPGs are laughably simple anyway: Day Of The Tentacle gives you fewer
things to do, but makes you work really
hard for each specific result. That said, the game lays out its rules
of conduct — harsh, but consistent — quite clearly from the beginning, and
never lets the player down with dead ends, deadlocks, or dead bodies (in Maniac Mansion, there were situations
in which your characters could actually die; Day Of The Tentacle is deathproof all the way). The game plays
out at a leisurely pace, where (after a short while) you can freely navigate
between any of your characters at any given time; only at the very end a drop
of tension is introduced when you have to run circles around the annoying
Purple Tentacle trying to shrink your characters, and even then it is quickly
understood that it is more a matter of calmly and properly timing your
actions rather than action-style reflexes. All in all, cracking these puzzles
is a fun thing to do — and if you feel lost every once in a while, you might
as well just enjoy being lost, soaking in the game’s overall atmosphere while
waiting for a stroke of inspiration. |
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As inventive and ingenious as the
game’s many challenges are, let me tell you this: unless you yourself are
made out of silicon or any other semiconductor, you are not playing Day Of The
Tentacle to solve puzzles. You are playing Day Of The Tentacle to soak in its seemingly endless humor, whose
expanse in this game is at least several times wider than in Monkey Island — with the player
controlling three totally different characters for the price of one Guybrush,
and guiding them through three different worlds, with an atmosphere of total
whackiness being the sole tube of glue joining them together. It is still a pretty large tube of
glue, resulting in what I would call the only major weakness of the game’s
spirit: despite lots and lots of formally different elements that separate
the Past, Present, and Future (most notably visible in the graphic
representations of the respectively «colonial», «modern», and «futuristic»
models of the same mansion), all three settings still unfurl as rather
insignificant variations on the same panorama of absurdist characters. This
is at least partially intentional, given that some of the characters in
different epochs have their doppelgängers
in other time periods: for instance, the 18th century Benjamin Franklin,
flying his electricity-attracting kites on the lawn, becomes the
stereotypical 20th century novelty goods salesman with his gun lighters and
exploding cigars (if you were looking for a philosophical edge to this game,
here’s a good spot to stop and think). But the downside is that, while
switching from Hoagie to Laverne and back again, you are probably not going
to go «wow, now I’m in 18th century
America! and wow, now I’m deep in
the future!» Because essentially, you are just staying on different screens
of the same comedy world. Arguably the most fantastic thing about
the game are the characters of Hoagie and Laverne themselves. Unlike the
classic time-travel or Alice-in-Wonderland type setting, neither of the two
shows the least bit of confusion, giddiness, or amazed disbelief — instead,
finding themselves actually physically present in their new temporal
surroundings, they largely continue to behave the same way they would react
to just reading books on the subject, the only difference being the ability
to get some direct feedback from the info source itself. Hoagie’s type is well established by an
early dialog between Dr. Fred and Bernard ("Good boy. Does he have any
experience with electronics?" – "Uh... I once saw him take 3000
volts directly through his head without batting an eye" – "Didn’t
he pass out?" – "Well, he was already passed out when it
happened"). He may seem to be taken out directly of some early Nineties’
teen comedy, but the dialog he is given reveals him to be quite sharp and
inventive when he feels himself triggered — which, admittedly, does not
happen too often. His interactions with quasi-18th century Founding Fathers
are hilarious because neither of the two parties seems to pay much
significance to the decidedly odd looks of the other, though Hoagie does not
mind tweaking a bit of history to make it more adaptable to his modern tastes
(hence his endless stream of recommendations for the American flag to Betsy
Ross: "How about a skull with scorpions in its mouth?", "We
need a babe in a leather bikini, swinging a broadaxe", "The guys
say they want a big family crest, and in the four corners, they need a keg,
some babes, a guitar, and some drum sticks, and underneath it all put AMERICA
ROCKS!!"); clearly, his actual interest in his country’s history goes a
bit deeper than he allows to let on. In the end, Hoagie may be a
caricaturesque representation of the damn-it-all-to-hell mindset of the
astute, but lazy, rebellious, but nonchalant American teen from the early
1990s, but then the game’s Founding Fathers are equally caricaturesque — and,
in some ways, extremely
sacrilegious — depictions of the American Ideal as putting personal profit,
vanity, and pomp before everything else ("Does Mrs. Washington know you
wear so much makeup?" – "One must wear makeup when one receives the
phenomenal amount of media attention that I do", Mr.
Soon-To-Be-President humbly remarks). Unlike Sierra’s Pepper’s Adventures In Time, an «edutainment» project which was,
coincidentally, also released in 1993 and which actually tried to give the
players some sort of history
lesson, Day Of The Tentacle is more
concerned about, perhaps, giving you a hint that there may be far more in
common between the immaculately memorialized Founding Fathers and the lazy,
dirty, scruffy, value-less, nihilistic kids of today than one would suspect. But my favorite character by far —
arguably, one of the top 2–3 playable female characters ever written in the
history of video games — is Laverne. Nobody truly knows why she looks, walks,
talks, and acts the way she does — is it drugs? cerebral palsy? too much
formaldehyde in her medical lab? Officially, she qualifies for the status of
«strong female character», particularly seeing that she is chosen to survive
in the most dangerous environment of the game (the dystopian future in which
humans have been enslaved by Tentacles), but that strength is truly one of a
kind; throughout her segment, Laverne remains a mystery, and although we do
get that she is smart, on the whole her morals feel weirdly skewed, as she
allows herself to flirt with the tentacles and seems upset when the Tentacle
Doctor refuses to operate on her ("Are you gonna use your scalpel?"
– "No" – "Darn. Do you wanna use mine?"). The ambiguity
is all-pervasive: on one hand, she does warn us about the risks of putting
hamsters in microwave ovens, as if apologizing for the wanton cruelty of Maniac Mansion, on the other,
Laverne’s very first lines in the game, upon seeing the little animal, are
"Look, Hoagie, it’s a hamster... just what I need for the dissection lab
tomorrow!"). Despite the fact that modern players,
upon coming across Laverne’s character, tend to use (or even abuse) the word
"creepy" (indeed, I have a hard time imagining somebody writing a
character like Laverne into any video game released after, say, 2010), it is
precisely her "creepiness" that allows her to thrive and come out
on top in the Tentacle Dystopia, where she watches humans suffer their fate
with more scientific interest and, perhaps, even curious excitement rather
than such boringly predictable reactions as horror or pity. Humorous takes on
futuristic dystopia were nothing new in comics or cartoons by 1993, of
course, but I am not sure if any of those had such colorfully written
characters as Laverne to act as witnesses of the human race paying for its
pride and stupidity. Whenever I play as Laverne, I somehow get a vague, but
awesome feel of total invincibility coming over myself — verily the freaks
shall inherit the tentacle-ridden Earth, I say unto you. Beautifully and hilariously written
dialog is so abundant in the game that, had it been adapted into a movie, it
would have become an endless source of quotations to rival at least Monty Python, if not the more popular
and mainstream giants like Tarantino. "If you want to save the world,
you gotta push a few old ladies down the stairs". "What was your
favorite part of the Declaration of Independence?" – "I like those
S’s that look like F’s...". "Hello, my silent gauze-wrapped
friend... do you think it’s strange, me talking to a mummy? It’s not so
different from talking to guys at med school... except even you dress better
than they do". I could go on like that for hours, but I think you get
the drift even if you haven’t played the game (or were an utter fool and
rushed through it way too quickly, because a lot of that golden content is totally optional). It might, in fact, be the first
computer game ever whose atmosphere is created 90% by character interaction:
not fighting monsters, not running away from ghosts and ghouls, not wandering
around in beautiful and mysterious forests, not flying around in outer space
(the Chron-o-Johns would look decidedly silly in such an environment), not
going after pixelated romance, not enjoying the illusionary wonders of 3D
physics, but simply bumping one sprite against another and absorbing the
absurdist juiciness of the aftermath. And if you needed any additional proof
of that, there are a couple of objects, like the Textbook and the Invisible
Ink, which can be used on any NPC
in the game, past, present, or future, just to elicit a variety of responses
from the targeted crowds. (If you have Laverne taken out for a walk by the
Tentacle Guard and use the Ink on the monster, his response is "ON THE
GRASS! DO IT ON THE GRASS!", which always cracks me up). In doing so, Day Of The Tentacle really made your
machine come alive — although, of course, in order to achieve the required
goal, the game also had to make good use of technical progress, and this is a
good pretext to stop ranting on matters of substance and raise a glass to the
techie guys. |
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Technical features Note: The following section will cover (and, where
necessary, compare) both the original 1990 edition of the game and the 2016
Remastered Edition. No separate review for the remake is necessary, since it
changes nothing in the base game but rather just provides a complete overhaul
of its visuals, sound, and gameplay interface. |
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In terms of visuals, Day Of The Tentacle marked a
significant stylistic departure for LucasArts games. Peter Chan, who had
previously worked in a subordinate function on the art of Monkey Island 2, was assigned the
leading role, and his vision for the game demanded that it be made more
explicitly cartoonish and grotesque, Loony
Tunes-style. This approach did not quite stick with the studio — it
certainly influenced the style of such games as Sam & Max Hit The Road (released the same year and also
artistically directed by Chan) and Curse
Of Monkey Island, but overall, Day
Of The Tentacle probably remains the one LucasArts game that is closest
in style to a classic old-fashioned cartoon — something that was fairly
innovative back in 1993, when videogames were generally more busy thinking
about how to make their imagery more
rather than less realistic. The difference is
particularly obvious if you survey the transformation that the Edison Mansion
has undergone since the days of Maniac
Mansion. In the old game, although severely limited by lo-res EGA
graphics, the Mansion itself looked «normal» — at least, in that it had
normal walls, normal doors, normal beds, normal tables, next to which one
could find all sorts of weird objects and characters. The renovated Mansion
is all bent, curved, and twisted, with the main shapes and features remaining
largely unchanged all the way from colonial times into the future. So are the
characters, each of them drawn as a cartoonish type — Bernard with his 50/50
head to body proportions, Buddy Holly glasses, and obligatory bowtie; Hoagie
with his baseball cap, huge wads of eye-covering hair, pot belly, and
skull-adorned shirt; and, of course, our Supergirl Laverne, with naturally
explosive hair making all perms run for cover, clothes that ignore the very
existence of the word «fashion», and one eye twice as large as the other.
Animation of the leading sprites closely follows their basic shapes — Bernard
is always limp and slithery as a snake, Hoagie waddles like a tank (though,
when necessary, he displays an unusually uncanny ability to squeeze his huge
body through tiny holes), and Laverne... well, suffice it to say that she is
certainly in line to inherit John Cleese’s position at the Ministry of Silly
Walks. Nobody is spared the
ignominy, least of all the Founding Fathers who, admittedly, bear fairly
little resemblance to their historical prototypes, but are at least
recognizable by the... umm... shapes of their wigs? The important thing is
that the graphic representation matches the personality — poor John Hancock
has a permanently terrified and beaten up expression on his face, while
Jefferson, on the other hand, holds aloof with a look of absolute smugness
and haughtiness, and George Washington is just dandying around (he actually
looks about twenty years younger here than he really was at the time, so I’m
guessing Chan must have been a secret admirer, despite the strictest
directives to picture the Founding Fathers as anything other than
narcissistic fops). Similarly, the fascist /
dystopian elements of the game are also neutralized by the visual style:
Purple Tentacle and his minions are portrayed as not in the least
frightening, clownish buffoons jumping around on suction cups, with their
evolutionary victory achieved not so much through a diligent quest for
self-improvement as by the humans’ own unbeatable propensity for
self-destruction. If there is a single mildly
terrifying graphical presence in the game, it comes in the shape of the IRS
agents coming for an audit in Dr. Fred’s mansion, though, admittedly, most of
the terror comes from their carefully emotion-stripped voices than their
identical identities. The game features very few
close-ups or cut scenes, but in this particular case, it does not really need
them: the cartoonish characters manage to be pretty expressive even as
mid-size sprites, and there are no significant stylistic differences on those
rare occasions when Chan and his team zoom in on the little guys (one could
argue, for instance, that the close-ups in Secret Of Monkey Island looked stylistically jarring next to the
general look of the game). The cartoon style also works wonders on facial
animations during talking; although the animations are still largely
restricted to the mouth (sometimes the characters bob their heads, too), they
are more detailed, and come across as more «cartoonishly realistic» than
facial animations for more traditional digital sprites (e.g. Guybrush
Threepwood from the Monkey Island
games, or just about any Sierra game at the time). All this means that when it
finally came to remaking the game for modern graphic systems, more than 20
years later, it was decided that the original graphics — unlike those in the
first two Monkey Island games —
would only receive a proper facelift, instead of being completely redrawn
from scratch. Indeed, once the remaster finally appeared on the market, with
all the graphics upscaled and shiny and de-pixelated, it became clear that
this was the right approach. Just like a carefully remastered movie from the
old days, Day Of The Tentacle
Remastered looks 100% true to its original artistic vision, except that
it is actually possible to gaze upon it on a modern monitor without shedding
tears of disappointment — replacing them with tears of joy. If the new
graphic styles of the first two Monkey
Island games can have their supporters and detractors, it is hard for me
to imagine even the most hardcore nostalgia-phile complaining about the
game’s new look. (Other than, perhaps, the re-designed interface — but even
if one prefers the old mechanics, from a purely visual point of view the game
still wins, since the new pop-up interface allows the game picture to
completely fill up the screen). |
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Music for the game was
created by resident LucasArts composers — Clint Bajakian, Michael Land, and
Peter McConnell (legend says that each of the three was primarily responsible
for one of the three time periods: Bajakian for the 18th century, McConnell
for the 20th, Land for the 22nd). As usual, the soundtrack is never ambitious
enough to steal the spotlight, but it contributes heavily to the atmosphere,
with the music enveloping you every step of the way and the iMUSE system of LucasArts
ensuring for smooth transitions between the various parts of the soundtrack —
particularly important now that the player has the option of randomly switching
between three different characters (and thus, three time periods) at any
point in the game. As you can probably guess, Bajakian’s
18th century soundtrack is significantly different from the other two: little
baroque themes accompany Hoagie on most of his travels, except for his
presence in the Constitutional Hall, where a louder and prouder martial theme
replaces the more courteous music of elsewhere. The other two parts are more
similar, especially since Land’s «futuristic» soundtrack is created by relying
more heavily on electronic tones while often playing fairly conventional
vaudeville tunes for comic effect (apparently, musical tastes of the
Tentacles had been formed some time around the Jazz Age, if you can believe
it). That said, the soundtrack being nice
and all, it is clearly not the music that Day
Of The Tentacle will be remembered by, but the fact of it being one of the
first ever fully voiced LucasArts games (the very first, I think, was Indiana Jones And The Fate Of Atlantis)
— and not simply voiced, but voiced by professional voice actors, prepared to
give it their all. Voice director Tamlynn Barra (who had also worked on Indiana Jones) has to be given credit for
making all the right choices and giving all the right coaching, the result
being sheer comedy gold where pretty much every actor nailed pretty much
every personality. This inevitably means that my own
silver prize goes to Denny Delk for his deep, thick, ever-unperturbed,
mock-Zen impersonation of Hoagie (Denny would become an absolute LucasArts
veteran, starring in almost every game; arguably his most classic performance
is that of voicing Murray the Evil Skull in latter-day Monkey Island games) — and the gold, of course, goes to Jane
Jacobs as the bug-eyed, creepily somnambulant Laverne. Jane, unfortunately,
would soon afterwards forever disappear from the acting radar — but not
before giving Laverne that fit of terrifying evil laughter which you can
encounter from her at the most unpredictable of times, making you feel glad
that she and her scalpel, after all, are over there and you, the fortunate player, are over here. She also seems to have somehow
intuitively designed her own unique set of emotional expressions — her
Laverne is not actually bereft of emotionality, as she is quite capable of
expressing amazement, excitement, sadness, and anger (not fear, though: that
particular part of our girl’s brain seems to have been amputated), but her
semi-retarded, semi-philosophical way of processing all these takes some
getting used to. If we really feel the need to nitpick,
a small problem is that the studio’s budget was seemingly limited to only a
few actors, so that too many characters are voiced by the same person, and
every once in a while they might feel a bit overworked. For instance, David
"Mr. Zed" Traylor does a fantastic Ed Edison (the son of Dr. Fred,
recovering from the horrible trauma of his microwaved hamster), and a properly unpleasant Thomas
Jefferson, but his Ben Franklin comes across more like a fussy old Victorian
lady than (even a parody on) an 18th century American intellectual. And
Delk’s Hoagie is much more convincing than Delk’s George Washington, who
doesn’t exactly sound authentically «Virginian-English» (of course, nobody really knows what the general sounded
like, but I think a little more historic authenticity would have sounded
fantastic when combined with "I was just admiring my reflection in the
window... striking, aren’t I?"). That said, the absurdist-comedic nature
of the game easily absolves the actors from all such sins — after all, they
are not here to give you a lesson in American history, they are here to
subvert it and, if possible, send up the grotesquerie of its mythologization. |
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Interface The basic mechanics of the gameplay was
arguably the only aspect where the original Day Of The Tentacle did not introduce any innovations —
essentially, it runs on the same version of the SCUMM engine as several
previous LucasArts games, starting with Monkey
Island 2: the bottom left part of the screen is given over to nine
command verbs which you combine with objects, while the bottom right part
displays your inventory (represented by pictures rather than verbal
descriptors). The only addition is a special character icon, which you can
change to another character if you want to switch from Bernard to Hoagie or
Laverne. All of this has, however, been
redesigned in the Remastered
version of the game, where changes to the interface system are the second
biggest modification after the upscaled graphics. As in the Monkey Island remakes, the
screen-bottom interfaced has been completely removed — the inventory window
can now be brought up as a separate pop-up with a keyboard or controller
shortcut, and other shortcuts allow you to switch between characters.
Meanwhile, operations with objects or people are performed simply by clicking
on them and selecting one of several possible actions represented by pop-up
icons (LOOK, OPEN, CLOSE, USE, etc.). I think that the primary purpose for
this re-design was to avoid the issue of too many useless choices, as in the
original game, technically you could, e.g., TALK to the OUTHOUSE or OPEN
GEORGE WASHINGTON, which typically gave you just a generic negative answer.
The new system means more work for the designers (since each object in the game
has to be manually correlated with a specific set of actions), but less
unnecessary fuss for players, making the game a little easier to beat, as you
no longer find yourself flooded with tons of extra useless choices. Interaction with other characters takes
place largely in the form of dialog, for the options of which you get some
space freed in the bottom of the screen. The way dialog is structured, by the
way, constitutes another minor nitpick from me: a huge part of the game’s
charm is simply to engage your contacts in small talk, and much of that small
talk comes in the form of mutually exclusive options — as much as you want to
ask all the questions and retort
with all possible reactions, you
cannot (unless you abuse the hell out of your save and restore buttons). This
is actually typical of contemporary LucasArts games, which liked much more
than Sierra to give you the illusion of free choice, but is a bit frustrating
for a game which essentially does not need multiple playthroughs. (Note that
the guys at LucasArts eventually realised the problem — starting around The Curse Of Monkey Island, you were given far more free rein in
exhausting those dialog options). On the other hand, this does give you
the option to «build your own Bernard / Hoagie / Laverne» if you wish — a bit
more mean, a bit more sympathetic, a bit more curious, a bit more
indifferent, whichever you think suits the game’s atmosphere best. When
chastised by the Tentacles for her appearance, for instance, I always go with
"I guess I’d better go shoot myself, then", but you might want to
choose "Where I come from, I happen to be quite the babe" or
"I think I’m going to kill you" if you feel your Laverne feels more
like it. As I have already mentioned (and this
is a commonplace for LucasArts), the game mechanics completely excludes death
situations or lock-ups: useful objects do not expire until they have really
run out of use, your heroes are always free to trade stuff across the
chronostream, and if you fail at some task (like, for instance, getting the
Tentacle Judges to judge your entry in the Best Hair, Best Smile, Best Laugh
contest), you can always come back and try it again after making some
changes. But do not expect the Remastered
edition to make life significantly easier for you: other than including a
separate Developer’s Comment, there are no thrown-in hints to be had — so
either brace yourself for the challenge, or use your trusty Chron-o-John to
look up a walkthrough on the Web. |
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Day Of The Tentacle is
a game that will not be appreciated by «just about anyone», much like Monty Python or the Simpsons or Catch-22 or just about any work of art
built around a specific, idiosyncratic sense of humor — great comedy, maybe
even more than great tragedy, tends to be limited to certain wavelengths
which some people catch easily and some do not catch at all. And with
adventure games long since relegated to the dusty back shelves of
videogaming, you do not see it all that often listed in those predictable
«best games of all time» lists which typically begin with Mario Bros. and end with God Of War or something. But taken on
its own, outside of its humiliating historical context and genre limitations,
Day Of The Tentacle is as close to
perfection as a comedy-oriented adventure game could ever get (and the fact
that it came out in the same year as Gabriel
Knight, as close to perfection as a tragedy-oriented adventure could ever
get, clearly makes 1993 the single greatest year in adventure game history).
The brilliant premise of the plotline; the complex and absurd, yet oddly
logical puzzles; the uniquely unforgettable characters; the tasteful and
intelligent quality of the humor — the game succeeds at practically each goal
it sets before itself. In the end, one could argue, there is even a sort of general moral to
the game — illustrated by the brilliant final shot, as the Tentacle Flag is
hoisted up on the Mansion instead of the old Stars’n’Stripes (right after Bernard’s
closing words: "Looks like everything’s back to normal!"). If you
do so desire, the game can be
rationalized as a general warning for humankind, well on its way out due to
greed, vanity, and stupidity as illustrated by many of its characters. Yet that
motif in itself is nearly as old as humankind itself, and what matters, of
course, is not the message but the way it is delivered. And in the end, both
the message and its mechanisms of delivery feel just as relevant and poignant
today as they did back in 1993 — even if the game itself, as I have already
indicated, could only have been
done around 1993. So, if ever you needed an argument that old video games are
worth playing in the first place, go no further than Day Of The Tentacle to clinch it and crunch it. And put in
flying-V guitars instead of stars, for that matter. |
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