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Everything I am about to write is, in a way, largely redundant, because I already wrote an In Praise Of post about Day Of The Tentacle back when I still wrote In Praise Of posts, and I also reviewed the Remastered version when it came out in 2016 1.

Dreamcast Sam Max Day Tentacle Series That I

I think it is a strong contender for the best adventure game ever made, its probably also the smartest adventure game ever made, and Day Of The Tentacle is the one game in this series that I actively go out of my way to replay every few years.

Because of this, its also the one game in this series where I have the entire solution already memorised.

Playing through it for the eleventh or twelfth time with an eye on how well the game breadcrumbs its puzzles does make me think that that most things in Day Of The Tentacle are either pretty well-signposted, or else can be worked out using normal human logic despite the time-travelling premise theres nothing here on the order of the sodding crab sandwich in Fate Of Atlantis.

Still, it should be kept in mind that I am hardly a neutral observer where this game is concerned, and I couldnt be objective even if I wanted to.

For example, its the first LucasArts adventure game that was designed to be fully-voiced from the start by modern standards the actors put in a performance thats good rather than outstanding (although nearly every line that comes out of Dr Freds mouth is excellent ) but which fits the Saturday morning cartoon nature of the game, and most of the jokes are written with voice acting in mind and leverage this magical thing known as comic timing that the previous games could not, and so it holds up pretty well today.

By 1993 standards, however, Day Of The Tentacle is nothing short of exceptional.

Loom and Fate Of Atlantis both had voiced versions released after the original text-based ones, but because they were afterthoughts that were solely trading off the fact that people wanted full multimedia experiences that would make use of their expensive CD-ROM drives rather than anything actually designed for voice-acting from the get-go, both of these prior attempts were extremely ropey to the point where I wouldnt have played with the voice acting on even if Id had the option.

By contrast I cant imagine playing DOTT without voice acting since it adds so much to the experience, and it set the standard for future LucasArts adventures which all had a similar quality of voice acting; it was one of the big selling points for their games that made them feel so much more polished than the competition.

Day Of The Tentacle is a full-on cartoon and it leverages this to good effect, with all of the comedy Wile-E-Coyote animations (eyes bulging, necks stretching, falling off of high places and leaving person-shaped holes in the ground, that kind of thing) that Monkey Island 2 arguably overused feeling perfectly at home here.

The background art for the various locations inside the mansion is full of crazy, irregular shapes and oversized cartoonish proportions on otherwise normal objects, which is a style that I dont usually enjoy but which works here, and which has insulated Day Of The Tentacle from aging like the more realistic backgrounds in Fate Of Atlantis did.

And something that I hadnt realised before doing this series was that Day Of The Tentacle was the last hurrah for the interaction verb UI; the intro sequence is a good indicator that it might be outstaying its welcome with LucasArts, as this gorgeous full-screen cartoon suddenly loses the bottom third of its screen area to a comparatively ugly interface, and after DOTT LucasArts ditched it in favour of some alternative approaches starting with Sam Max.

It still works perfectly well here and I do have a soft spot for the specific iterations of it that were used in DOTT and Monkey Island 2, but this time around I got a definite sense that it was starting to be left behind by the ridiculous pace of technological improvement in the 90s PC market and that it might be time for something new, which is not something that I think I would have said if I hadnt just played through eight games that used it in a row.

The answer is: not all that much, really it keeps the character switching mechanic and the concept of exploring a single mansion location, but while it also recycles characters such as Bernard and Dr Fred they might as well be from completely separate universes since all they really have in common are the names.

However, where Maniac Mansion had multiple characters exploring the same mansion which is unexpectedly complex, since many of its puzzles involve having characters positioned in separate locations doing some finicky timing-based puzzle Day Of The Tentacle introduces a hard border between its three protagonists by separating them into three different time periods at the beginning of the game.

Hoagie explores the mansion in the past, Bernard explores it in the present, and Laverne explores it in the future, and despite the potential complexity that all time-travelling shenanigans inevitably invite I actually think this makes Day Of The Tentacle a far simpler game.

To compensate for being split over three different timestreams the mansion has been made much, much smaller its a grand total of sixteen screens and its got more or less the same layout in each one, meaning you can learn the spatial element of the game very quickly.

This stands in stark contrast to Maniac Mansion s messy sprawl, or even a more recent attempt like Monkey Island 2 which spreads the action out over multiple locations on three different islands Day Of The Tentacle is, ironically, a much more logically organised game, where all you really need to worry about is figuring out the solutions to its cause-and-effect puzzles.

Most of the conventional puzzles are heavily signposted if you just listen to the dialogue one of the categories for the Human Competition is Best Laugh, so you need some way of making Dead Cousin Ted laugh.

The inflatable clown Oozo laughs sarcastically every time he hits you, and it doesnt take a huge amount of brainpower to figure out that the two are related somehow; all it then requires is figuring out which item will let you extract Oozos voice box, and that is a problem thats entirely solvable using real-world logic.

The puzzles based around accomplishing something in the past to change something in the future are a little more complex, but even here the game drops some very heavy hints.

In general if something is present in two different time periods theres some way of using it to transport an item between the two; for example, the washer-dryer exists in the present and the future version of the mansion, and you have in your inventory a sweater that is explicitly stated to be soaking wet the moment you pick it up as an additional hint, so its just a matter of sticking the sweater inside the dryer and finding enough quarters to keep it going for a hundred years.

That last part is where things really do start to veer into the cartoonish, but once you have your giant pile of quarters there are only two things in the game you can potentially use it on and one of them wont let you, so you can at least predict the correct interaction even if the usefulness of the outcome isnt immediately clear.