The Neverhood

The Neverhood is an adventure game made completely differently from all the others: every location, character and moving part was sculpted from modelling clay and captured frame by frame using stop-motion. The player controls Klaymen, who wakes up in an empty world made of corridors, flat surfaces and strange little machines, and gradually finds out who created him, what happened to this world, and what role his adversary plays in it. The story is revealed piece by piece, mainly in a giant hall with records written across the walls.

The gameplay is classic adventure fare, but remarkably spare: a minimum of items, no branching dialogue, and an emphasis on spatial and logical tasks. The player flips levers, looks for the right order, solves mazes and learns to read symbols the game never explains anywhere. Several of the puzzles rank among the more demanding ones, and the player is expected to take notes on paper. The playthrough is fairly short but dense with ideas. Technically it was a Windows title that offered digitised animation in high resolution instead of polygons; the data volume was considerable for its time, and the game required a CD drive and a decent hard disk, though not an accelerator.

The art style is why people still remember the game today: the clay has a visible texture, the characters move jerkily, and their gap-toothed faces come across as both funny and unsettling at once. The music mixes unaccompanied singing, blues and bizarre choral pieces, and ranks among the most distinctive soundtracks of the 1990s. Critics praised the game for its originality and humour, but sales stayed low, and it never got a direct sequel in its original form. Collectors also remember it because the physical models of the locations really existed, and building them took months of work. Today The Neverhood holds cult status and is revisited even by people who otherwise don't play adventure games, precisely because nobody has ever made anything quite like it since.