scummville

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Maniac Mansion: Day of the Tentacle

I've always been interested in point and click adventure games. I want to take a swing at designing some for myself one day. The trouble is that I don't actually have a ton of experience with the genre, aside from some Humongous Entertainment games I played as a kid, and Homestar Runner parodies. So to solve that problem, I installed ScummVM, downloaded some easy to find LucasArts games off archive.org, and decided to start with a title I had heard much praise for but didn't know much about.

Maniac Mansion: Day of the Tentacle (or just Day of the Tentacle for short) offered exactly the experience I was looking for. It's considered a classic of the genre for a reason. It's your typical point and click adventure game with maddening inventory puzzles, requiring you to think outside the box and try interacting with every object in your environment in every creative way you can think of in order to make progress. With your goal in mind, you try to follow a line of logic and piece together how you can make use of the resources at your disposal. The solutions to puzzles are way out there, so creative that it leaves you feeling like a mad genius when you figure out how to make progress. Just as often, though, the solution will be something so unintuitive that you'd never think of it in a million years. I found the game's official hint book (also available on archive.org) useful at times like these.

The thing that really elevates the puzzles in Day of the Tentacle is the use of time travel. Once you make enough progress in the game, you will eventually be controlling three separate characters all solving puzzles in the same house at three different time periods simultaneously. By changing something in the past, you may alter something in the future that allows you to solve a puzzle there. One central mechanic of the game is that you can pass items to the past or future, greatly increasing the pool of items accessible to all characters under your control. The possibilities are so overwhelmingly large, brute-force checking every single interaction just isn't possible. Either you think outside the box, or you get yourself unstuck by looking up the solution.

I would be remiss to ignore the game's comedic style in my analysis. The thing that gives point and click adventure games their identity isn't just the puzzles: it's the world and characters that act them out. Day of the Tentacle features background art that pops like mad: rich colors, deep shading, and warped angles that exaggerate every surface. Every playable character is a delightful freak, and hearing their commentary never gets old.

My experiences here will serve to remind me that any puzzling adventure game is only as good as the creativity put into it, both in the puzzles themselves and in the world built up around them.

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Why would SPY Fox’s friend hide in the bathroom mirror?

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The game of Anteater Feeder

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stuck on the past

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Noose.

Random art I did.

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Separate from this post are the S&M sketches, because I want exactly 300 posts (folks, I like beautiful numbers sorry)

S: Look at this slimy little adorable thing.

M: I wonder how hard you need to squeeze this thing so that its eyes fly out?

S: Let's check.

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I hate these stupid animals <3

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GEEK!!!!!!!!! I MISS HER

(i am doodling them to cope with finals it's so bad)

Edit: someone mentioned that this is not med school regelia and this is true... I didn't know they were different 💀💀💀 guys im in art school i am NOT a woman in STEM

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Your mom was right. It's better not to know.

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Missing:

Foster Boondoggle

Hasn’t been seen in World Wide Weather

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If Sam&Max was in the death note universe

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You know what I like more than creating new shit? Of course finding my old pathetic but so sincere first attempts at portraying the characters I love

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“Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge” Steve Purcell 1991

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current mood: carrot trying to create revolution and fix World Wide Weather’s treatment of their workers only to wind up the nose of a dapper snowman

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‘okay, now let’s move onto economic empowerment of employees’ - a talking carrot in this game for 6 year olds lghkgkj