Toonstruck

Enjoyed the game up until the treasure chest from the fish tank. It will not open.

(Received the game for free.) If you have memories of growing up in watching Saturday moring cartoons, or have at least once watched Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), Cool World (1992) or Monkeybone (2001), then this game will draw your attention. And why shouldn't it? Back when video games were largely looked down upon as being a passing fad and beneath any consideration for legitimate entertainment value, the cast is still a surprising list of Hollywood's who's who. And it is because of that stellar cast that I give two stars. We have: Christopher Lloyd, Tim Curry, Dan Castellaneta, David Ogden Stiers, Dom DeLuise, Jeff Bennett, Corey Burton, Jim Cummings, Tress MacNeille, Rob Paulsen, April Winchell, Frank Welker, and Ben Stein. Such a game should theoretically be a revolutionary success, right? Um... No. It cost 8 million dollars to make, released two years beyond schedule and sold only 150,000 copies world-wide. It was a commecial flop whose failure was blamed on "bad packaging". And this is where I stop at two stars because "bad packaging" wasn't the problem! The game should have put forward the best possible story, character development, writing and humor yet it falls flatter than Spike the Clown's balloon animals. For all of the acting tallent's best efforts, it is not enough to save this game and makes it worse. For example, Tress MacNeille's bunny voice is annoying to the point where I almost stopped playing the game. The humor is also an issue. Yes it is meant to be crude adult humor, but the presentation is horribly cringey. It comes across as being forced and lacks the skill that we see demonstrated by Thimbleweed Park's Ransome the Clown. Yes, he's crude but the delivery is spot-on and fits the story perfectly because *that is the character's personality*. Unless Drew Blanc is meant to be a person with a sleazy mind (who is making a kid's show) it doesn't match his character. Overall, the game is a disappointment and definitely not for kids.

**Intro** Toonstruck is a point & click adventure game starring Christopher Loyd back when he was pretty big (BTTF 1-3, Addams Family 1-2). You're a cartoonist who ends up in a mildly amusing cartoon world that follows "cartoon rules". You get stars by having someone else hit them, you motivate an elephant to run by scaring them with a mouse, that kind of thing. **The Good** The game was apparently a huge flop, despite all the money poored in. It looks nice, the occasional cartoons are decent and it also features voice acting by Dan Castellaneta (Homer Simpson) and Tim Curry (who coincidentally would later star in Addams Family 3). There's also a handful of funny jokes, like your character asking an anthropomorphic cow if they're not supposed to be on all fours. **The Bad** Toonstruck suffers from the usual p&c adventure game flaws. No map to quickly move between areas and see where you can do something, no hint button, no journal/quest list and lots of annoying slow text & unskippable bits. Also, nothing about the setting, story and characters is particularly interesting. There's a footman who is an actual foot, that's about it. It's also fairly short because they decided to cut the planned game in half to make a sequel. **Conclusion** I wouldn't recommend it unless you're really into adventures about cartoon stuff.

A lot of reviews on GOG are for those nostaglic for games they played when they were kids, so I assume that's what's going on here. There is a lot of humour which I find falls flat and bores me... once i discovered i can hit escape to skip to the next dialogue it was way less painful. There's some famous actors in this but they are not given anything good to work with. And since the puzzles don't seem very good there was really no reason to play the game.

By all merits, this is a game. Completable, and maybe there's a joke or two that still lands. To many, the mid 90s was considered the nadir of multimedia; relaxing standards resulted in a glut of shameless content upon reflection. Violent, overmuscled, crude, downpunching humor was often the order of the day. Toonstruck has a stellar cast, of which I wonder how they managed to get roped into the project in the first place. The plot is a standard "Straight man in ToonLand wants out", with the typical pitfalls of the era: Some of the most wretched cartoon trollop & tropes of the 1990s. Camp characters, awful visual puns, casual 90's racism, grossout humor, depictions of S&M which lead back into grossout, and contemporary comedic commentary that no longer makes any sense are all present here, and worse. All in all, combined with the moon logic sense of puzzle solving, an obnoxious world and annoying backtracking, leads to Toonstruck scraping the bottom of the game design barrel. Toonstruck is not fundamentally broken. But I would score it the absolute minimum above that. It treats humor as something to be stretched on a rack and overexplained until it breaks the joke apart by snapping it.