Day of the Tentacle

Day of the Tentacle is a direct sequel to Maniac Mansion and, at the same time, the purest showcase of what an adventure game can do. A purple tentacle drinks toxic waste, grows arms, and decides to take over the world; Doctor Fred therefore sends a trio of heroes — the nerd Bernard, the scatterbrained Laverne, and the pudgy metalhead Hoagie — back through time, only for the machine to malfunction and scatter each of them into a different era. Bernard stays in the present, Hoagie ends up two hundred years in the past, and Laverne two hundred years in the future.

Out of that grows the game's best mechanic: the characters send each other items through modified chemical toilets, and whatever one of them does in the past changes the world the others live in. A sweater shrunk in the washing machine, a dyed tree, or a letter mailed into the future — causality across centuries is the main source of both puzzles and humor. SCUMM controls were simplified down to nine verbs and an icon-based inventory, so the game moves faster than earlier titles. You can't die, and you can't get permanently stuck either.

Visually it's essentially a playable cartoon: the backgrounds and animation draw on the aesthetic of classic American slapstick cartoons, the colors are oversaturated, and everything is constantly in motion. The CD version had full voice acting, still ranked among the best-cast in the genre, and the disc also hides the complete original Maniac Mansion, playable on the computer in Bernard's room. At the time it received rave reviews and today is considered a classic that anyone who wants to know why the nineties are called the golden age of adventure games should try. The puzzles also have one rare quality: even the craziest of them make sense in retrospect, because the game sticks to its own rules and never cheats. That's exactly the difference between a funny adventure game and an adventure game that's just leading the player around by the nose. The sound design also includes an excellent soundtrack that shifts style depending on the era, so the past sounds different from the future. Few games from the nineties feel this fresh after so many years.