Review: Day of the Tentacle Remastered is an old game, but it still holds up

I grew up playing a lot of point-and-click games, my favorite from that time in my life was the Monkey Island games. There was something about Guybrush Threepwood and his quippy sass that really resonated with my child brain.

I have fond memories of King’s Quest VII, even though I didn’t succeed in anything more than letting a bull run loose in a china shop. Hell, I even ran around Myst and I use that term literally… all I did was walk from one side of the island to the other with no idea what I was supposed to be doing.

All of that to say that my love for the genre started early, so the fact that I’m only just now playing any form of Day of the Tentacle is some sort of crime.

Day of the Tentacle Remastered Gameplay and Story

Day of the Tentacle is an old classic point-and-click that was originally created by LucasArts, so if you see me referring to the studio, just know that it comes from the original developers. The remaster was handled by Double Fine Productions.

In this point-and-click, you play as three teens – Bernard, Laverne, and Hoagie – who are tasked with saving the world from an evil purple tentacle. Day of the Tentacle is actually a sequel to the game Maniac Mansion, but you don’t need to have played it to enjoy this title. 

Dr. Fred and the green and purple tentacles make their debut there and while I didn’t play it, there’s a small game of Maniac Mansion inside of Day of the Tentacle Remastered that may be just a smaller version of the game or the entire game itself.

For Day of the Tentacle, the setting takes place in Dr. Fred Edison’s motel where he has a secret lab hidden beneath the main floor. Getting down there, you find that he was dumping chemical sludge into the waters. This sludge is what you’re aiming to fix during the entire game because Purple Tentacle has been affected by it. It causes him to grow arms, his intelligence to increase, and has given him designs of world domination.

If we can go back and stop the sludge from dumping, then we can stop Purple Tentacle from taking over the world. To do this, Dr. Edison puts the three teens into separate porta-potty time machines with the intention to send them back in time to before the sludge is spilled, but something goes wrong. Bernard stays in the current timeline, but Hoagie is sent back to colonial times and Laverne is sent 200 years into the future where Tentacles are the ruling race and humans are pets.

You won’t be able to get them all back to the proper timeline on your own and will need to use each character independently to explore the surroundings and restore things to the way they were. One character won’t have everything they need in their time, so you’ll have to send things through the toilet to each other.

This system is unique but extremely frustrating. Point-and-click games of this era aren’t very linear in what needs to be done as it is, so when you add in this mechanic of having to send things through, cross the map, try them out, and repeat it when it’s ultimately not the right item can be extremely annoying.

Luckily, since this game is several decades old, there are walkthroughs and I highly recommend finding one because the logic for some of these combinations is wacky. Plus, we’re here for a fun time, not a frustrating time. Who cares if you get pointed in the right direction?

Art and Music

The fun thing about a remastered game is that you usually have the option to switch between the original graphics and the new. Day of the Tentacle Remastered is no different. While I vastly prefer the sleeker design of the remaster, seeing what the game looked like in the 90’s was fun.

Not only is the style more pixelated, as one would expect, but the layout of the interface is different. In the original, you had a bar at the bottom with a bunch of words like ‘look’ or ‘open’ that you had to click before engaging with the environment.

In the remaster, it’s as simple as right-clicking and choosing from the wheel that pops up. It definitely creates a more seamless playstyle.

While the art and set dressings are charming, be prepared to be assaulted by the music. It’s not a bad thing, per se, but you will have certain tunes stuck in your head for a very, very long time. Trust me.

Other than being an earworm, the music is fun and there’s enough variance between areas that it doesn’t start to grate immediately. I did have to turn the music down at one point, but I still kept it on. The loudness of the music was mixing with the loudness of the voices and creating something that wasn’t the easiest to focus on.

Speaking of voices, this is actually the first LucasArts game to feature voice acting. They kept the original voices and this is the portion of the game that really dates it. 

Coziness

There’s nothing timed in this game, so there’s the same cozy potential here that most point-and-click games have.

While I wouldn’t say this game is frustrating by any means, I think it comes down to individual responses. Some people don’t respond well to not being able to figure something out. I know I can be pushed sometimes when a game leaves me feeling exceptionally dim-witted.

I wouldn’t say that this game ever pushed me into the realm of aggravation, but I knew when to tap out and refer to a guide to get me where I needed to go.

Cons

Like with most point-and-click games – especially older ones – the solutions aren’t immediately obvious. It’s almost guaranteed that you will get stuck simply because you’ve missed something or because the solution is convoluted.

Day of the Tentacle Remastered is no different and actually suffers more from it because of the thing that makes it unique. Having three main characters in different time periods means that they all have a different set of items.

These items can be transferred between them and is a required mechanic to getting some solutions figured out. So, now you have to think about three different inventories and how they might help somewhere else. When you add in that you have to trade items in a certain location, this creates a lot of back and forth that can be extremely frustrating.

I have no shame in admitting that I played until I absolutely needed a guide and, honestly, I wouldn’t have finished if I didn’t. Some things just weren’t within my wheelhouse of even guessing would work together.

Verdict

For me, I’d never played this game before, but it still felt nostalgic to the games I had played in ye olden days, such as the Monkey Island franchise. As someone who is used to the way items fit together in ways that make little sense, I went into this knowing that I was going to need a guide. If you’re adamantly against using aids like walkthroughs, then you may want to skip this one. Because of the way you send things through time, it makes it hard to brute force combinations.

I had fun with it and while it’s not the most important game in history, I feel like I filled a little missing void in gaming knowledge by playing through it. If you’re a fan of point-and-click games, you should definitely pick up Day of the Tentacle Remastered.

You can grab it over on Steam, Xbox, and Playstaion for $14.99, Apple for $4.99, or if you have the Xbox Game Pass, you can play it for free!