The Neverhood (1996)

This is the tenth and final part of a series I'll be doing on games played during my childhood. You can read the others below. Thank you for reading this little saga.

Part 1/ Part 2/ Part 3/ Part 4/ Part 5/ Part 6/ Part 7/ Part 8/ Part 9

One of the best memories of my childhood is spending a single entire summer in my bedroom with my stepbrother as we tried to beat The Neverhood.

The Neverhood, crafted by Earthworm Jim creator and kind of (sadly) all around creep, Doug Tennapel, is an entirely clay based point and click adventure puzzle game. It features Klayman, the seemingly singular soul in the neighborhood, who awakens to a bit of mail in his mailbox - which appears to be hovering on a small platform over an endless void - and no real concept of where he is, why he is or even who he is. Most of the game is spent directing Klayman to picking up clues and pieces that will fill in gaps of lore, and eventually progress you down the plot. Unsurprisingly, if you know Tennapel's personality, the game makes heavy use of biblical imagery sculpted (get it? cause it's clay? whatever) to work within the world of the game, but it's not so heavy handed that its clunky or intrusive. It's perfectly fine. After all, this is world building, and so it's excusable.

There are various puzzles throughout the game, often sound associations, literal image puzzles or even just finding the right tool for the job, but having played through it again in the last few years as an adult, I can say they aren't exactly difficult, and the gameplay is still interesting. The game itself runs maybe 4 or 5 hours, if that, if you really take your time, so it's a good title to just quickly run through and experience. But, as always, I wouldn't be talking about The Neverhood if it didn't have a very personal relationship with me.

My stepbrother and I spent a lot of time in my bedroom in the summers, because my bedroom had been renovated after a large flood effected the house, so I wound up with the nicest bedroom outside of our parents, and because of this, my stepbrother wanted to hang out in it a lot, which meant we spent a ton of time playing computer and console games. Sometimes we'd play Battletech, or board games, but it was mostly video games. At the time, I was still the only kid with a computer in her bedroom, so we played games on my Windows 95 a lot, and one of those games was The Neverhood.

The Neverhood always appealed to me, likely because I too felt lost and confused in a world that didn't make sense, a world that - more often than not - felt insulted by my presence rather than welcoming of it. Everything was more or less a puzzle to my poor damaged brain, and frankly, I too often felt like a stranger in a "neighborhood" that I was unsure how I got there or what my purpose once being there was. It wasn't enough to just connect to the game, though, I also appreciated it on an artistic level. I always liked playing with clay as a little girl, but I also loved the character design, the architectural design, and the music itself is absolutely fucking fantastic and easily one of the greatest game OSTs ever recorded, and that includes its sequels soundtrack to boot.

But The Neverhood really struck a nerve with me primarily because you were all alone in this world. Sure, there were a few other characters - Robot Bill, Willy Trombone, Klogg, Hogarth - but most you barely interact with until easily 90% into the game, and otherwise you're virtually on your own in a world that doesn't make a whole lot of sense, and this is exactly how I experienced childhood. Adolescence was nothing but a puzzle in which I struggled to figure out on my own, and that's what drew me to Klayman, because we really were one and the same in our complete and utter confusion in regards to what surrounded us. And yet, Klayman was a hero, he was the one that was needed to bring peace and order back to the world of The Neverhood, and I wanted to do the same.

So, against my better judgement, I began to desperately try and control things within my household and try to make everyone get along. I tried to be the mediator, the one crossing the great divide, trying to make everyone like one another and keep as much trouble out of our family as possible. Sadly, this would prove to be a completely fruitless endeavor, as I later learned you simply cannot keep people who do not work together to not hate one another if they are so adamantly insistent on doing so. And so, unlike Klayman, I receded back into my hovel and decided instead to sit back and watch, becoming the historian instead of the hero. I figured that, if I couldn't save things like Klayman could, I could at least document it like Willy had done.

But to be a child, and one could argue Willy was a substitute for a child given his innocent behavior and mindset, is completely contradictory with childhood. You cannot document a history you are currently trying to survive when it's fresh and new. This made me into a multi faceted young woman wherein I am torn between a terrified child documenting and not interacting, and a more well put together adult who is capable of being a part of something and wanting to be with someone like my girlfriend. But making these two halves meld in a way that works is...less than easy, let's say.

It's hard to be both a people watcher and a person, at least for me.

I still look back fondly on the time I spent with my stepbrother, probably the only person in my household that I got together with was him. And I look back especially fondly on our time spent together in The Neverhood, because adolescence was a puzzle, and for a short time - even if only that one singular summer - I didn't have to weather it alone.

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Man, I loved Neverhood! Not when I was a silly little child catching her hands at videogames, really, the clay stop-motion animation fell into the uncanny valley too much for my stupid child brain and left me with one too many mental scars - but I digress, The Neverhood is a great game.

It's easy, it's mostly a showcase on what clay animation could accomplish even in a video game format (let's think through for a second: nobody had ever seen such a media into a video game, only through stopmotion animation, all developed mainly by Aardman productions in its nitty-gritty style during 1970 to mid-late 1990) and it's nothing more than a series of puzzles and nice clips that tie together a substantially basic plot.

Still, its characters are what made everything interesting: from the idle animations of Klayman (he could most basically do whatever you asked him to do, even almost kill himself in certain situations) to some random skits that could have gone otherwise unnoticed (if you haven't tried eating more than one berry from the weird mushroom thing at the rough beginning of the game, you haven't played it, mark my words) and from Willie Trombone weird origins (believe it or not, he is the son of Ottoborg, the late ruler of Neverhood and creator of a world that fell apart because he, obviously, forgot to put gravity in the mix) to Bil, the automatron with a golden heart and a soft spot for teddy bears, everything is probably what made Neverhood interesting to play to begin with.

There's also a more morbid touch to the world and it's all described in the nitty gritty in the lengthy Hall of Records - which I always neglected when I was just a child - such as Petri Alfonzo decapitating himself because, y'know, his head-ring (the same one Willie has) got stuck in places and he had gotten tired of it (intelligent, I know), Hoborg attempting to immediately kill his first "created" klay son, Klogg behaving like he was behaving... and all nice things.

All in all, I'd return to it moe times than I could count just for the sheer enjoyment I get out of seeing such a "pure" clay stopmotion.

Shame Armikrog didn't live up to its standard.

Rating The Neverhood is a tough one. When much of the industry was still making arcade-like games and toys, Doug TenNapel (best known for Earthworm Jim) and his team created nothing short of an incredible work of art.

And that's were the problems start. Put away the unique artstyle and the catchy tunes by Terry Scott Taylor and you're left with something barely classifying as a game. Some of this stems from Neverhood's genre. The mid 90s saw a spike in popularity for interactive movie point-and-click adventures and while the beautiful claymation adds a twist to the formula, it still boils down to the dreary pattern of clicking, waiting for a clip to play out, clicking and watching a slightly different clip.

As tedious as watching and waiting for something to do might be, I still think it would be unfair to simply judge The Neverhood as a point-and-click adventure. Its puzzle and overall level design may leave much to be desired, its art and vision is all the more praiseworthy.