Day of the Tentacle (1993)

None of the jokes are funny. The soundtrack's mileage evaporates with mere hours of play. The vague gestures in the direction of an ethos, sans silly sound effects and on-screen hijinx, are worthless. The concept of an adventure game, a notoriously hard-to-pace genre, predicated on Looney Tunes-esque slapstick, a notoriously immediate and punchy cartoon, assumed the blame for many a blasé moment in my playthroughs, wherein I would begrudgingly let the game do its thing in long-winded breaths, letting all of it slip past my every sense until I got put back in the driver's seat. All of this compounds to make wading through this game's deepest self-assured mires nigh unfun.

And yet, it is my comfort game. The puzzles are tactile, synaptic, devilishly versatile in their presentation, they make sense, which is more than your average adventure can even say. They weave into each other and their interplay is just able to be inferred without displacing room for thought. Solving one never pays in anything less than elation, the adventure is designed to nudge you into a puzzle chain without forcing you into any. Since I've spent so much time with it, I think calling it motherly is not unnatural. Or I just might've invested too much of my life into this glorified grab-bag of pixels to ever question that. I wouldn't know. I don't really want to.

I genuinely hold Day of the Tentacle in a similar regard to Monkey Island 2. It objectively has failings, many, in fact, but I can look past those. It whisks me away to a place where the tentacles wave freely and mad scientists gab with a voice like nails on a chalkboard, and that's all that really matters.

Preliminary: Oooo I'm so excited for this. I love the font from what I see in the screenshots and I love that it's by the Monkey Island team ahhh. I hope I don't get my hopes up too high which often makes a game more difficult to love.

Wow absolutely beautiful And Humongous Entertainment-esque.

Yep Great UI so far with the keybinds so you can make things faster. Good stuff

Day 1

I do really still like this but I don't see it quite being on Monkey Island 2's level, because it's more so the goofy vibe so there's not much sentimental music. Also there are lotttts of cutscenes. Which have been fun and like watching a cartoon from 93, but doesn't quite push it to that Favorite Favorites level

Also unfortunately it's having more so the first Monkey Island style dialog trees.

I love the wonky designs to the buildings and rooms with those strange jagged edges you saw in 90s cartoons and games, and I love that you move relativerly fast for a graphic adventure game. However, it just feels like it's missing something. The music doesn't hit me and some of the screens are great, but not as many as I had hoped/expected. Ugh I knew I shouldn't get my hopes up too high this always happens >.<

I do really like this screen tho

I wish the music were more striking. There are occasional melodies that catch my ear but for the most part I've been debating whether to mute it after I've heard a tune

I do like the way the time periods interact , with some good humor there (the sweater, the hamster, well all of it especially once you get more active with Laverne)

Welp I beat it in one sitting/night, so taht says something heh. I definitely had the adventure game hook, but it still just never quite clicked as much as I expected, plus even with the credits the music was just okay. Too goofy for my taste (tho it fits the goal of being goofy, indeed). And no special feeling at the end or (tho it was a sunset) the classic sun setting motif of game endings.

Look: 9/10 Definitely the highlight tho it didn't have as remarkably amazing screens as I had hoped, the overall Look and angles were great.

Sound: 7/10 Only because it was intended to sound how it was did it get a 7. When it comes to my enjoyment it's more like a 6.5

Play: 8/10 Missing something, but still a good ol addicting adventure game

Feel: 8/10 The humor was good and it was all around a good game, but just missing something to put it to that excellent/5 star category. Even the 4 star was sort of enforced by bumping some of these ratings thanks to the anticipation/Feel.

Attachment: 7.5/10 If it had better Sound and/or not elongated so much for the sake of funny, but game-detracting, cutscenes, this would be a replay game and likely a 5 star.

Overall: 7.9/10

Omg no matter what I do this gets a 3 star lol. I really need to stop giving honorary 3 stars becasue it's so hard to fall in the 8-8.49 range for 4 stars and games like this deserve that. But I guess this really was a case where I should've recognized that I wasn't loving the Sound enough to warrant a 4+ star and shouldn't have finished it, but being a favorite genre I did anyway. I dunno.. My rating system may be flawed argh

Completion: 100%

Playtime: ~2h 45m

Played this one because I know it's supposed to be a classic, but I'll be honest, I didn't vibe with it. The aesthetic and tone felt pretty abrasive to me right off the bat. A lot of puzzle solutions had me wondering how I was ever supposed to think of them short of looking them up or just trying every item on every person until I stumble onto something. I'm not the biggest fan of the character switching, it feels like it messes up the structure and pacing when I have to juggle three inventories that interact with three different sets of puzzles that only sometimes intersect (and it's not always signposted when they do). And the story is like, well, it's silly on purpose, but with the jokes not really landing for me I kind of wondered what the point of continuing was.

I don't know. I liked Monkey Island, which is by the same people and has a very similar type of cartoon logic puzzle design. Maybe that game is funnier. Maybe it's more tightly designed. Maybe it's just that I played Monkey Island when I was 9 and I played DotT when I was 29. Who can say?

I grew up playing classic Lucasarts adventure games. The first of them I touched, in fact, happened to be Maniac Mansion on NES, which I was too young to know better about and beat. Fast-forward to the recent times and Day of the Tentacle was the reputed classic I have never touched before. What's the excuse for a fan of such games to not engage it, especially when it came out remastered?

Three friends are tasked to stop Purple Tentacle from taking on the world. Thanks to Dr. Fred, they get split up between the past, present and future in a time-traveling mishap and have to work together achieve their goal of saving the world. The strong point for me is that this game manages to make all events happen in a single house, with time differences adding to the freshness and variety throughout the gameplay. At least it's easier for me who got a bit burnt out on exploring places in adventure games, occasionally.

Puzzle solving applies a less common method of transfering objects between playable characters by using the, well, time toilet. Such liberty allows for the player to think up possible ways to a solution outside the box, courtesy of Lucasarts' adventure game trademark. What bothers me about the puzzle aspect is that trying stuff around has me find myself solving problems before I even knew what the obstacles really were, more than often.

In its remastered format, Day of the Tentacle sets an excellent example why it became a point n click adventure to follow for the future generations. With a colorful cast (besides the cringey voice acting of Laverne), unorthodox puzzle solving and persistent comedy value to go by, I am satisfied having it finally ticked off my bucket list. Fans of the genre should do themselves a favor to add it on their list, as well.

I was a bit hesitant to jump into this game, since I have generally preferred the less cartoony-looking LucasArts adventure games, and something about this one's aesthetic in particular didn't look appealing to me. After playing, though, I think this is definitely one of the more enjoyable games that the studio made back in the day.

Humor is one area where this one shines, with loads of little gags that mostly go over well. That combined with some of the ridiculous scenarios and the colorful hand-drawn visuals make it feel entertaining and fun to play. I think they walk the line well in making something in the style of a wacky cartoon that could be appealing to people of many age groups. It feels well-written, focused, and packed with good ideas.

What really makes this game work is its solid execution of the idea of one main location visited across three time periods, where items can be sent from one time to another, and actions taken in the past directly impact the future. More than just a setup for some funny moments, this is woven into the design of the puzzles needed to progress through the game in pretty creative ways. Some things you end up doing are totally off-the-wall and ludicrous on paper, but somehow work because of consistency in the location across time periods, and the well-controlled amount of movable parts across the game.

Sending items and switching characters between time periods is made extremely quick and easy here, which is a relief since that could have been a pain. It is still an old-style game though with verb-based point-and-click mechanics that can occasionally be a bit more cumbersome than I'd like for performing simple actions. Generally though, nothing too bad. The only real downside of the multiple time period setup is that the main characters barely end up interacting with each other.

While it's not one of my absolute favorites, in terms of entrypoints into the world of classic adventure games, this is one of the picks I can recommend. It's on Game Pass in a clean-looking remastered form with only very minimal technical weirdness with some dialogue timing. As usual with this kind of game, you'll likely need a guide or a lot of patience to get through this, but whichever way you choose, it is definitely a memorable time.

Day of the tentacle was very good to remember, that was a very nostalgic game. I played it on my childhood and i didn't remember how is enjoyable this game was.

The remastered version has a good illustration graphic, good voice acting and pretty funny story! The gameplay and controls are plenty honest and the genre also brings a nostalgic feelings.

Some puzzles are really complex and makes you read entire dialogs, think about the scene and search for hidden objetcs. This is sounds like a Masterpiece from Lucas Arts 93'. Feels good !

“One way to get the most out of life is to look upon it as an adventure.” -William Feather

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Day of the Tentacle (originally released in 1993) is a game that I had not played before this remastered version. However the beautiful animation that was almost like a 90’s cartoon come to life and the silly humor were more than enough to keep me hooked from beginning to end. I’ll come right out and say it, I had to use a walkthrough for this game. Some of the puzzles were incredibly tough and I have no shame in throwing that out there. It did not take away from my overall enjoyment of the game though, in fact I liked it so much that I have changed my laptop wallpaper to the one offered by the official site for the game.

I think The Well-Red Mage said it best when he described the humor in this game as “Dad Jokes”. They make you laugh and cringe at the same time, which is not the type of humor everybody is into so be aware that things do get quite a bit cheesy.

So onto the game, you play as a group of three that find themselves in quite the perilous situations. Bernard, Hoagie, and Laverne are palling around with a bit of a mad scientist named Dr. Fred Edison. This lands them a trip in the time machine to three separate destinations (one of which being the present) and from there it is time to point and click adventure your way back to the present day with all characters and defeat the tentacle foes!

So what is it with these tentacles? Well there is an evil purple tentacle and a chill green tentacle who wants nothing to do with Purple’s world domination plot. Green calls in a favor to Bernard to stop Dr. Fred from putting him down along with Purple, thus allowing Purple to escape and getting the lot of them into the whole situation.

Day of the Tentacle is the sequel to Maniac Mansion, a game that I haven’t played through entirely but I really enjoyed the bit that I did play. The amazing part about my time playing Maniac Mansion? It happened right there on Day of the Tentacle Remastered!

Click here for the full review... https://thewellredmage.com/2017/09/05/day-of-the-tentacle-remastered/