Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders

I suppose this is the kind of thing that comes out of the first few brainstorming sessions when developing an adventure. There are plenty of crazy stuff, which is okay, some silly jokes and lots of puzzles. There are even multiple ways of solving a puzzle. Unfortunately, nothing makes sense. You are not give any idea of what you are supposed to do. There are tons of areas to explore, yet the game punishes you for exploring by giving you (very) limited cash. If you run out of cash, you lose. There are also many unexpected ways of getting stuck, often without any warning. The only way of "playing" this is to use the guide that comes with it and following along. None of the puzzles make any sense, and you often have to guess where to go next. Guess wrong, and you may have to restart the game. There are very few dialogues, so it is not worth playing even for the jokes (and, quite frankly, if you were to sit down with other people and do some brainstorming, you would probably come up with most of the jokes here. They aren't clever, just silly.). To make it worse, there is barely any music.

This has to be the worst adventure game I've played in my life. And I've played them all, even the infamous titles from Sierra with their frustrating dead ends. My positives: - The FM-Towns-version has lovely graphics and nice sound effects and music My negatives: - Absurd puzzle "logic" - Hundreds and hundreds of potential dead ends (you forgot to get a tiny item at the beginning of the game? This can lead you to a dead end near the end of the game. You gave away a seemingly unimportant item during the game? It's very possible you'll need it somewhen later to finish the game. You traveled too much on the globe? Then you'll have not enough money to finsih the game...) - Mazes, many mazes which are a real pain to solve - Annoying traveling mechanism which takes too much time - Some unskippable and repeating sequences - humor not at all on par with other LA-titles - narration extremely shallow, no development of the main character - most of the time the game gives you not the slightest idea of what you are supposed to do, where you are supposed to travel to, resulting in you travelling around the world far too much - and consequently expending too much money to be able to complete the game (see "dead ends") - everything you do and experience feels bland, traveling around the world is just there to get an answer to a puzzle, you never actually feel "there", there is no feeling of adventure at all. Zak is really a godawful, absolutely terrible train wreck of a game. If you want to play it I recommend to get a walkthrough and follow it closely. I have not the slightst idea of how anybody could ever be able to finish this mess without a walkthrough at all. Why the hell did I play this game? I wanted to play it because it was the last Lucas Arts-adventure on my list. Simple as that. I can see why nostalgia may cloud judgement in the case of these old games but this simply isn't a "good old game" in my book, it's one of the very few missteps Lucas Arts made.