Toonstruck

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.

You 'member when people put on their rose tinted nostalgia glasses? OH YEAH I 'MEMBER! 'member when people would vote something astounding when its absolutely MEDIOCRITY? OH YEAH, I 'MEMBER! 'member when a game was ORIGINAL and not just some REPACKAGED 30 year old game at a laughably high price in comparison? OH YEAH I 'MEMBER! M E D I O C R E back in the 90's and its EVEN MORE medicore today. These point and click games DIED for a reason. B O R I N G. Some dialog is really funny and the voice acting is GREAT. SOUND CUTS OUT AND I HAVE TO EXIT THE GAME, FREQUENTLY. TECHNICAL PROBLEMS.

I ran out and bought this at release as it was very well received in magazines but was disappointed. It aims for the zaniness of something like Day of the Tentacle and Sam & Max, but with an adult twist. Unfortunately, this attempt at "edgy" humour falls flat on its face and what you are left with is an incomprehensibly unfunny adventure. There's nothing special in the puzzles or hidden anywhere else in the game either - it's a poorly-assembled mess that almost never inspires interest in its ham-fisted, tiresome and cringe-worthy proceedings. I did manage to complete it and would not consider it very difficult. Remember getting stuck in a number of places where poor design and over-long animations made it a lot more cumbersome, tedious and infuriating to try possible solutions. To this day Toonstruck is hidden at the back of my collection - sharing a corner with Ultima IX. It was a lesson to my sixteen year-old self to be more discerning in future. Since it flopped very badly it is sometimes held up as a sign of the beginning of the end for the once-mighty adventure genre - a big-budget game that got very good reviews but still failed. To me it was more a failure by the reviewers to spot an absolute stinker.