Day of the Tentacle

Day of the Tentacle is a classic LucasArts [point and click]? adventure, so humour is at a high level. It's one of the sequels to ManiacMansion. (The other being [Zak McCracken]?.)

The Story

The characters from Maniac Mansion are brought back in this very amusing sequel, animated in a Tex Avery style with lavish backgrounds and an intricate plot. Purple Tentacle and Green Tentacle, creations of Dr Fred, wander the grounds of the lab in the opening sequence, when Purple Tentacle takes a drink out of the lab's polluted creek. He is mutated into an Evil Genius Tentacle, complete with two stubby arms, and he hatches a plot to take over the world.

Bernard, Laverne, and Hoagie, the three heroes of the game, unwittingly help Purple Tentacle escape capture and achieve his goal. Dr Fred then has the idea of using his time machine to send the three kids to the past to stop the toxic chemical leak and thus prevent Purple Tentacle from becoming an evil genius. Having been built on the cheap, his machine goes haywire and Hoagie ends up 200 years in the past, Laverne 200 years in the tentacle-ruled future, and Bernard stays in the present.

The game thus takes place in the same place in three different time periods, with each character limited as to what they can do in their particular time. The time machine works well enough to pass items back and forth, but not people. The player has a rich and funny environment to play in, with plenty of obtuse yet logical puzzles, and rewards in the form of very funny animations.

Some consider Day of the Tentacle to be the apex of the graphic adventure genre, where story, gameplay, and art style all match perfectly, and the quality of all components excels. No puzzle is too dependent on "hunt the bright pixel" or overly contrived and unsolvable, yet the game requires good, clever thinking to solve.