The GWJ Adventure Game Club - Game 20: Day of the Tentacle

Day of the Tentacle (1993)

IMAGE(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steam/apps/388210/header.jpg)

This classic 1993 point and click adventure game is the brainchild of Dave Grossman and Tim Schafer. Set in a peculiar mansion, the game allows to control Bernard Bernoulli and his friends Hoagie and Laverne as they travel through time in an attempt to stop the evil Purple Tentacle from taking over the world!

You can find the wikipedia page here, usual spoiler warning apply. How Long to Beat estimates about 6 hours to completion. Available on Mac OS, MS-DOS, Microsoft Windows, OS X, PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, iOS, Linux, Xbox One!!
If you get stuck, you can check out the Universal Hint System, or just ask here!

You can find the main thread over this way. We'll be playing Day of the Tentacle in June 2020, with an extra month if need be.

Will be starting a new game over the weekend, for sure!

I've still got two episodes on Tales, but I'm definitely playing this in June! Apparently, I still have 27 achievements to unlock on Steam!!!

Does this include Maniac Mansion? xD

I'm always up for replaying DotD. My favorite point-and-click together with LeChuck's Revenge. I will definitely be playing it soon as well.

Pink Stripes wrote:

Does this include Maniac Mansion? xD

I'm always up for replaying DotD. My favorite point-and-click together with LeChuck's Revenge. I will definitely be playing it soon as well.

Last I checked, yeah, Maniac Mansion is still playable in the newer, remastered version of the game.

The Remastered version does include the first game, Maniac Mansion, but no, I'm not including Maniac Mansion for this month.

I played through this game a couple of years ago, and had a blast. I played the original Maniac Mansion back in 91 and loved it, so when the sequel came out and my computer was too old to run it, I was crushed. It's a good thing it was remastered so that I could finally experience the awesomeness that is Day of the Tentacle! So, even though I won't be playing it again, I'll definitely follow this thread to see what you friends think!

If someone needs to buy the game, it is half-off on the GOG Summer Sale.

It was a PS+ game at some point in the past as well.

Summer sale? Wait, WHAT?

Eleima wrote:

Summer sale? Wait, WHAT?

I know, right? I think they are just acknowledging that we lost the Spring to the pandemic and we're not getting it back.

Oh, and Pillars of Eternity is on sale too!

I finished the game today. Even though I only remembered a few puzzles before I started, a lot of it came back to me very quickly as I was playing.

A few random thoughts (note that the spoilers are very spoilery about puzzles in the game):

This is still a fantastic game and the remaster is wonderful. The humor and the charisma of the characters is incredible. 

The puzzle design is second to none and the game doesn't get too difficult although it is not easy either. The only puzzles that still seem a bit obtuse to me are

Spoiler:

the textbook puzzle

and

Spoiler:

the white paint puzzle

. The latter does come with some hints but they are hard to catch. I know a lot of people complained about

Spoiler:

the washing-the-car puzzle

, but that one always seemed obvious to me because

Spoiler:

the joke about rain after you wash your car is very present in my culture.

The idea of playing three characters separated through time works incredibly well and the ways you have to circumvent  or exploit that time travel is super clever and hilarious (i.e. modifying items by "changing history" outside of traveling in the Cron-o-John).

Another aspect of the game that I find super interesting is how the humor is embedded in the puzzles. This is very tricky to me because you want puzzles to be predictable, but you need humor to subvert expectations. Other games solve the problem by keeping the humor in the story or dialogue but these guys managed to really blend the two. For example, it is straightforward to realize that

Spoiler:

you need to get quarters to use the dryer in the basement. But then, the game throws a joke where you get a whole bunch of quarters instead, and when you used them, the dryer runs forever and yields a tiny hamster-sized sweater. 

I really love this game and this is probably not the last time I play through it.

Since we were just discussing the jokes about John Hancock's signature on Eleima's stream, I'll leave this here.

So gald you had fun, Pink Stripes! I wrapped up my own playthrough in a single sitting last night, and had a lot of fun hunting the achievements I'd missed back in 2016 (though I get the distinct feeling some were added further down the line, because they were unmissable, but I hadn't gotten them).

As I was streaming, it occurred that some folks probably need a heads up:
PSA: folks, you don't have to walk back to the Chron-O-John to flush items to your friends, just drag it to their portrait!

Thanks for that Hancock article, Pink Stripes, it's both hilarious and fascinating.

I found this in my ps plus library. I played it on the Amiga first time round but remember nothing! Thanks for the thread I’m downloading it now and let’s see how I get on, I have never played a point and click on console before so that will be interesting too.

bbk1980 wrote:

I found this in my ps plus library. I played it on the Amiga first time round but remember nothing! Thanks for the thread I’m downloading it now and let’s see how I get on, I have never played a point and click on console before so that will be interesting too.

That's awesome! I'm curious to know if they use the trackpad on the PS4 controller for the interface. If they do, it should be pretty comfortable to play on a console. Also, the new interface of the remastered version should be more amicable to playing with a controller. In this interface, you don't see the actions as verbs at the bottom of the screen but rather click on someone or something you can interact with and the possible actions show up in a wheel-like context menu.

Eleima wrote:

As I was streaming, it occurred that some folks probably need a heads up:
PSA: folks, you don't have to walk back to the Chron-O-John to flush items to your friends, just drag it to their portrait!

Thanks for this, it would be awful if someone played through the entire game more than once without realizing you can do that, right?

Pink Stripes wrote:
Eleima wrote:

As I was streaming, it occurred that some folks probably need a heads up:
PSA: folks, you don't have to walk back to the Chron-O-John to flush items to your friends, just drag it to their portrait!

Thanks for this, it would be awful if someone played through the entire game more than once without realizing you can do that, right?

Yeah, that would be absolutely terrible. I'm so lucky that didn't happen to me 7 years ago. Nope, didn't happen. Didn't happen at all. So lucky.

*twitch*

HAHA. Well, I joined the club I guess. Kudos for looking up that old post.

Pink Stripes wrote:
bbk1980 wrote:

I found this in my ps plus library. I played it on the Amiga first time round but remember nothing! Thanks for the thread I’m downloading it now and let’s see how I get on, I have never played a point and click on console before so that will be interesting too.

That's awesome! I'm curious to know if they use the trackpad on the PS4 controller for the interface. If they do, it should be pretty comfortable to play on a console. Also, the new interface of the remastered version should be more amicable to playing with a controller. In this interface, you don't see the actions as verbs at the bottom of the screen but rather click on someone or something you can interact with and the possible actions show up in a wheel-like context menu.

I played a couple of hours last night, the percentage complete tracker shows about 25%. The PS4 doesent use the track pad but does just let you flick between points of interest on the screen by flicking the right stick and then uses the wheel system for picking your verb. It works really well and removes pixel scanning with a mouse. Thoroughly enjoying it so far although when i quit i had no clear way on my next thing to do so ill see how i get on tonight

Ok, that's pretty handy. Good luck with the game! You may know this and I think Eleima already posted it but if you're really stuck, UHS is a good way of getting a hint without using a guide that will just tell you what to do next.

Ok, please give me a reason not to buy this right now: https://www.amazon.com/getDigital-Te...

EDIT: Idk what the deal is but when I include the link on HTML, it breaks. Here is a pic:

IMAGE(https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/61YACtbBolL._AC_SL1100_.jpg)

Eleima wrote:

As I was streaming, it occurred that some folks probably need a heads up:
PSA: folks, you don't have to walk back to the Chron-O-John to flush items to your friends, just drag it to their portrait!

Thank you for the heads up Eleima, I would 100% have been tracking back and forth to the toilet each time, without this!

You’re quite welcome!

Pink, I don’t even want to know how you found that! ^^

So I wrapped this up tonight. I had a fantastic time , the game hit the cuddly nostalgia zone whilst still being fun. The new interface is a real quality of life improvement although i did play a bit with the proper verbs at the bottom of the screen for the sake of it.

Only two puzzles where i reached for the hint system:

Spoiler:

Using the letter to get into the room with the joke gun

and

Spoiler:

Using the scalpel to get the laugh box out of oozo

I would probably have never got there on either of them without UHS.

Thanks for running the club I would never have pulled this out my library otherwise. Looking forward to future ones now!

I'm so glad you had fun with it!! That's really the primary goal of this club, bringing joy with all these delightful games, so I'm pleased that it hit the mark for you, bbk1980!

I also finished a few days ago, though I was pretty reliant on a guide. For some reason I found doing so more palatable than I did for Grim Fandango. Maybe the more limited environments helped? Maybe the style just carried me? Dunno. I did solve a few puzzles based on the vague description I vaguely remembered given by a friend way back in the day. Quite enjoyable, quite the nostalgia trip.

Oh sweet!!! I’m glad you enjoyed it. And bo worries, guides are a totally legitimate way to progress through a game, I’ve used them on a bunch of occasions!

One thing this game does is give you a lot of hints through dialogue and things that the characters say to themselves sometimes. However, those can be easy to miss sometimes.

I do think that limiting the environments to three separate versions of the same mansion really reduce how much time you spend backtracking and that helps make the game faster and works really well. There's a lot less backtracking than I remember in other games of the time, such as Monkey Island, and that's really good.

Pink Stripes wrote:

One thing this game does is give you a lot of hints through dialogue and things that the characters say to themselves sometimes. However, those can be easy to miss sometimes.

I do think that limiting the environments to three separate versions of the same mansion really reduce how much time you spend backtracking and that helps make the game faster and works really well. There's a lot less backtracking than I remember in other games of the time, such as Monkey Island, and that's really good.

I found this too although I do wonder how much that was the remaster greatly reducing load times between rooms from when I played it as a 13 year old....