Rex Nebular and the Cosmic Gender Bender

I love this game. I played it a LOT back in 1994-95 after getting it as part of a Microprose collection with our new Gateway2000. It has always stuck with me, and it holds up amazingly well. I've told my girlfriend about it for years and now it is finally here! It's fun. It's very rewarding. It unfolds the world wonderfully well and makes you want to discover each new screen with excitement. It's one of the few adventure games that it's FUN to die in, because it doesn't really set you back at all and they are varied and graphic. Perverse with a strong sense of female-empowerment. Done with a chauvinistic attitude that it is aware of and criticizes. This is one of my HIGHEST recommendations on this site (along with titles like Torment, The Longest Journey, Interstate '76.)

Can't say how much I love this game. 1st time play thru with no nostalgia rose colored lenses. It really is that good. Pros: excellent origianal soundtrack. It reminds me of old time silent movies where the organist sat at the front and played during the movie, changing tempos etc to the screen action. Only think much better fully realized music, sometimes just a throbbing synth bass to simulate tense scary situations to full blown synth orchestra. Love it. The graphic art is outstanding. Fully realized landscapes and figures, animals and actions. The best bit of the game is the dying animations (with no penalty, you just auto reload at the same scene to try again). The text tool tips can be hilarious as you look and explore or try different combos. You can tell the devs spent a ton of time on trying to cover any situation a player may try. The story is pure camp fun and the action is pure adventure. Cons: No quick travel makes exploration a tad tedious at times. The immense amount of actions and inventory combinations make it also tedious and confusing as to what you are supposed to do. No journal to track your actions and no hints of what you are supposed to be doing next. If you miss a text conversation thats too bad so sad. Resolution is pretty vague and items are hard to see on the landscape which means you spend an inordinate amount of time just clicking on things to see if they are items/actionable hotspots etc. that is pretty normal in adventure games but this game its more or less just trying to identify what that dark colored blob may be. Add in that some landscape items are clearly drawn and stand along and just begging to be clicked but end up being just nothing.. adds another layer of tedium gameplay. However many cons I list the charm and comedy of the game is pure adventure treasure. Its very easy to get immersed in this psuedo 1950s land of the 50 ft woman island of dr mourea space camp odyessy.

To Retroism, the publisher of this re-release - crack your retro games before releasing them digitally after 20-30 years. This is amateur hour. Am I actually supposed to look for a particular word from a particular page of the manual in 2021? You have really though that having people to ALT-Tab from the game, look for the PDF of the manual, and jump through all the ridiculous 90s copy protection hoops *instead* of letting them play the damn game is a great move? What were you thinking? This is insane.

I found the game a little aimless- the humor is lackluster and mostly just commentary on how stupid/boorish your character is (though he actually seems pretty clever, given what he has to pull off), the characters seem a bit random and are only there for a scene or two each, the nudity and adult themes are present but only a handful of times, and even though the plot relies on the Gender-Bender gimmick, it's actually not used very much and doesn't have anything relevant to say about gender issues... though at the same time, it's nice that they didn't wheel out dozens of tired men vs. women jokes and left that stuff mostly in the background. It's a quirky and fun game, just a bit disconnected and not all that funny. The classic pixel art graphics are very good, on par with Lucasarts games, and the design of the locations is coherent and impressive, if sometimes a bit silly. The puzzles are the real draw, as most of them are quite good... the game really makes you think, and I even got stuck a couple times, though the solutions seemed obvious once I finally figured them out. There are some red herrings that can be a bit frustrating, and lots of unfair deaths that you have no way of knowing how to avoid the first time, but since the game starts you right back before your fatal move, it's more humiliating than annoying. There does appear to be one section where you can get stuck forever if you don't have the right item or use it in the wrong way, but this is very late in the game and right after a point where most people would create a backup save anyway- for the most part, the game is forgiving in this regard. Lastly, the supposed four different endings are actually the real ending and three game overs that have a little extra text and animation- it's a bit of false advertising that makes the game sound deeper and more replayable than it really is. That said, if you're looking for a light-hearted sci-fi adventure with solid puzzles, definitely pick this up.