For some strange reason, I never played the original Day of the Tentacle.
I say strange because I played some of Lucasart’s other great point-and-click adventure games: Full Throttle, Grim Fandango, The Secret of Monkey Island (I still own disc copies of Grim and Full Throttle) but DOTT passed me by. I’m not sure why that was but I’m making up for that now, thanks to Double Fine’s remastered DOTT on PlayStation 4, PC, PS Vita and Mac.
I pre-ordered the game on PS4 ($23, I think) solely so I could download it onto my PS Vita as well – and the point-and-click game play is perfectly suited to the smaller form factor of Sony’s handheld, and while some of the text might be a little harder to read with my ageing eyes than on a 55-inch TV, Day of the Tentacle just feels right on the Vita.
DOTT has players control the three main characters – Bernard, Laverne and Hoagie – as they attempt to stop Purple Tentacle who drank some toxic sludge behind the mansion of Dr Fred Edison. The game involves different time periods and the solving of puzzles to try to thwart Purple Tentacle.
Players interact with items in the gameworld using actions such as “use”, “pick up”, “open” in an attempt to solve the game’s puzzles.
Like other remastered Lucasart’s games, you can either play it in the new remastered graphic style, which looks really nice, or – at the touch of a button on the Vita and a press of the touch pad on the PS4 controller – it reverts to the game’s pixellated art style. I found myself flicking back and forth between the two styles, but it really shows how much work Double Fine put into modernising the game’s visuals.
Here’s some video from the PS4 version (no spoilers, I don’t think). The first one shows Bernard in the game’s opening moments exploring Dr Edison’s mansion
while the other shows Hoagie exploring the time period he finds himself trapped in after one of Dr Edison’s Chrono-johns malfunctions
Some of the puzzles are stumping me but I can see me spending a lot of time with Day of the Tentacle Remastered, and that’s a good thing.
