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Rating: I remember with joy and a slight touch of nostalgia when, as a child (it was the nineties), I played what were called point-and-click, that is, graphic adventures, a genre of video games that has practically fallen into disuse, tormented and thrown into oblivion by shooters and other flashier games, yet which I still believe hold a special place in the heart of every long-time gamer. The glorious '90s saw the rise of numerous production companies that would set the standard, among which those that come most easily to my mind are Blizzard for RTS and RPGs, Id Softwares and Valve for FPS and... Lucas Arts, of that savvy George Lucas, for graphic adventures.
"Day of the Tentacle" saw the light when the publishing house was already established, with other gems like "Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders," "Loom," "Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis," and, above all, the first two "Monkey Island" games (timeless masterpieces).
The game in question uses the same graphics engine as the aforementioned titles, namely SCUMM, in a slightly more advanced form, both in terms of color quality and pixel resolution, which gives a cartoonish, lively, and animated graphic style to the product, but above all, a humorous and zany component with a perfectly executed gameplay.
Born as a sequel to "Maniac Mansion," another famous Lucas Arts game, the plot features as protagonists a bespectacled nerd named Bernard, who wears high-waisted pants and loafers, the hefty metalhead Hoagie, complete with a black skull t-shirt and long raven hair, and finally the eccentric Laverne, a medical student with a perpetually manic expression and a bouncy walk. This bunch of hilarious characters is contacted by Green Tentacle, a tentacle-shaped creature the result of Dr. Fred's experiments, an old mad scientist blatantly parodying those of horror B-movies, who asks for their help due to the accident that befell Purple Tentacle, his cousin: having drunk from a stream polluted by Dr. Fred's laboratory's toxic waste, he went mad after growing two hands, and is determined to dominate the world.
The only remedy to stop the inevitable conquest of humanity by the tentacle will be to go back in time thanks to the Doctor's time machine, but a mishap will catapult Hoagie into the distant American colonial past and Laverne into a future overrun by tentacles, leaving Bernard in the present to deal with Dr. Fred in an attempt to repair the time machine.
The entire adventure will have the player control the three characters and play on temporal paradoxes whereby an action occurring in the past can alter the future.
Thus, for example, when Hoagie cuts down a tree in the past (with the help of George Washington, who is discovered in the past to be a resident of the Mansion!), in the tentacle-dominated future where Laverne is, the same tree will disappear.
Another mechanism that the characters can exploit is the "time toilets," that is, booths through which to send objects through the temporal weave to their companions.
The game interface is one of the simplest, and though it seems dated, remains pleasant and functional, with the game commands "use," "take," "push," "pull," "open," "close," "look" placed on the bottom left, and the inventory with collected items to be used to solve puzzles at the bottom right of the screen.
Puzzles that appear well-calibrated and rewarding, never banal or obvious, as well as dialogues with the incredibly original characters encountered throughout the events. The music underscores each moment of the adventure with effortless and skillful irony, and numerous are the episodes capable of throwing the player into uncontrollable laughter and creating a direct path to their heart (unforgettable the mummy in the beauty contest, the hamster in the microwave, the inflatable clown with the mocking laugh getting stabbed, the dancing dentures, and many more...).
In short, simply yet another masterpiece from Lucas Arts from its roaring years, the golden, shining years of point-and-click...years bound never to return but which have left behind an immense video game legacy.
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