Maniac Mansion

I compare this game to other games of the time that I recently played like Space Quest. A good comparison would be Space Quest III since that game and the Enhanced Edition of Maniac Mansion came out at the same time. MM has an arguably better interface and graphics, but SQIII has a really good soundtrack that is completely missing from MM. This game is also more cryptic than SQIII. It has better replayability, but only a little. Only 4 of the kids really have a way to beat the game. Once you play through the game once, you'll breeze through it again for the second or maybe third time. I personally felt that the humor wasn't as good in this game compared to the SQ games, but that's just a personal thing. It was ok, but a bit dry. It's worth playing, but it's a product of its time for sure. The lack of any discernible soundtrack for the supposedly Enhanced Edition really hurts this game when other games that came out at the same time had good soundtracks. I never played this game, so nostalgia isn't really something that affected my decision here. I can't understand why anyone would want to play the 1987 version. Both the graphics and sound are worse than the Enhanced Edition and the sound wasn't really anything to write home about in that version either. I played this on Linux and the built-in version of ScummVM that came with this didn't play well with KDE. Using ScummVM from the Ubuntu repos worked perfectly though.

Truly a legendary game. I remember being so impressed with myself because I could solve it with any of the kids in only a portion of an hour. Maniac Mansion deserves a home here at gog.com and in your library.

I came across this game only after I had played Day of the Tenticle and the Monkey Island games. I'm grateful that this one exsists because of what followed but playing this game is very different to the golden age of Lucasarts adventure games.

A milestone of the genre about a group of highschool students wandering into the mansion of a mad scientist to rescue their kidnapped friend. A Scooby Doo episode with challenging puzzles and some gore here and there. This release comes with both the original and the enhanced versions, offering the buyer a choice that the Day of the Tentacle Remaster does not. I'm partial to the enhanced one, and if you aim to play that only, consider buying the DOTT Remaster instead. As of today, the enhanced version also does not have the protection system enabled by default. That aside, this release doesn't come with the bulletin board, which is not only entertaining to read but provides useful hints to some puzzles. I'd recommend giving it a read on the web. The game itself is pretty good. Groundbreaking for its time for sure, but nowadays the scarcity of a plot and, more importantly, of interesting characters doesn't do it any favors. It throws some curveballs here and there in that regard, but overall what you see is what you get: the playable characters are all high-school kids stereotypes who, nevertheless, don't act much differently from one another during the game (with some notable exceptions, i. e. Bernard). The plot has basically one twist at the end and that's it. Compared to its brother game Zak McKracken who has much more variety of characters and a much more developed plot it feels pretty underwhelming. The puzzles range from clever to "difficult but fair" to "completely unfair for a first playthrough". There's many situations that will get you stuck or killed, much more compared to the aforementioned brother game, so don't go easy on saving. That said, its atmosphere, its challenging design and the few actually interesting characters it has do hold it up pretty well. I do recommend to play it at least once, you won't be disappointed, just keep in mind that it's an almost-40 years old game and it shows its age. And remember to keep your chainsaw in the kitchen!

One of my all time favorite games. I highly recommend it. If you like adventure games and have not played this, get it now.