Wednesday 17 April 2013

The Neverhood

Usually when I write about a specific game title, it's something I'm playing or I've just completed, but today I'm going to talk about a game I beat about 4 years ago.

So chances are, you have never heard of The Neverhood.  I know when I first was introduced to this game by a friend at university I had never heard of this fucking thing before but holy shit I'm glad I found out.

The Neverhood is a old point and click adventure game that was released in 1996 and from what I understand on the Wikipedia page it wasn't released in Europe which explains why I had never heard of the damn thing, but it could be wrong.

Anyway, the whole thing that made this game different from every other PC point and click adventure game is that the whole thing was done in claymation, and it was really good claymation too.  Everything from the settings to the characters and animations were completely done in clay, I dread to think how long it took to record all that shit for the game.

At this point I'd talk about the story but sadly it has been too long since I last played this game so I don't really remember it, at all.  I do remember enjoying it but I can't remember what the fuck happened.  It's not the kind of story that people would get their games as arts hat out for, but it was a competently written little adventure.  There is a complete plot summary on the wiki page if you care that much.

The gameplay was pretty standard point and click stuff, but the puzzles were pretty good.  They weren't the stupid moon logic puzzles that you would see in some point and click games on the PC (Necronomicon is a game like that which sticks out in my mind) but they were challenging enough so that you felt satisfied about solving them.  The only really annoying thing about the game play is that there is a part where you have to find tapes, and to get one of the tapes you have to pass through a 38 screen corridor filled with game lore on the wall.  You don't have to read it (I didn't read all of it to be honest) but you absolutely HAVE to get the tape at the end, and it's a little tedious.

Finally the absolute best part of this game, the thing that triggered my memory and made me want to write a big gushy post on it is the music.  But I'm not going to tell you how good the music, I'm just going to post a track and have you judge it for yourself.

Anyway if you can find this game, give it a go, it's fucking amazing.  No amount of gushing I do will do it justice, just go find it.

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