This game wears its influences proudly, but it's no mere Day of the Tentacle tribute act. A lot of modern adventure games are too easy for me but this struck a nice balance. The puzzles were sometimes difficult, but never really unfair. The humour was mostly pretty good, and great voice work meant that even the occasional less funny joke was at least delivered well. There's a built in hint system which I found myself using only a couple of times and the game gave me a solid 15 hours of playtime.
The original game is ok, like a low budget LucasArts style comedy adventure. However the "remastering" is dreadful. The graphics are a mixture of redrawn and simplistically upscaled, including - rather bizarrely - one character with a redrawn head and a blurrily upscaled body. The game engine is buggy and does not properly respect 4:3 resolutions even if you choose them, the result being that you are essentially forced to play in widescreen. This wouldn't be so bad if any care had been taken over the widescreen conversion. There are numerous visual bugs including sprites surrounded by a white box which was meant to be transparent, sprites that are misaligned and end up with a "seam" around them and bugs introduced by the horizontal+ conversion to widescreen. This would have scored better if they'd included the original version as an extra. The remaster allows you to turn off the enhanced graphics but all this does is exchange the upscaled graphics for the originals so it doesn't help with the bugs. The sound is pretty terrible too, with some characters sounding like their clips have been converted to mp3 repeatedly at the lowest quality settings. I'm not sure how this could have occurred because that kind of compression wasn't used in games in 1996 as far as I am aware. My guess is that they've actually applied some noise reduction software in an extremely heavy handed way. Personally I would have preferred noisy voice files as an alternative to the characters sounding like they're under water but maybe that's just me. This is a truly dreadful cash in of a remaster only topped by the Simon the Sorcerer remasters in terms of laziness.
This was a mostly enjoyable game with an interesting story with some good world-building. The puzzles are mostly sensible and only really let down by the fact that it takes a long time to traverse the game world. Many locations are physically quite large, with multiple camera angles that change as you move around the area. As noted by other reviewers, some of the angles and the points at which the game changes to them were poorly chosen and this causes issues with navigation - slowing traversal further. I must call up radoslawg's review for misrepresenting some of the puzzles though. A lot of the issues mentioned appear to stem from radoslawg not paying attention (not knowing why he'd gone to work, not knowing why he needed to access the terminal etc.). Having played this game 2 days ago I can only say that if you don't know why you're doing something, maybe it's because you have other leads to follow up on? The game made perfect sense in this regard. On the point of making you wait for the microwave for two real minutes - I agree completely.
This game is unusual in that it is a cartoon first person adventure game when the subgenre is generally dominated by 3D (pre-rendered or real-time) games that are serious in tone. I had a fun time with this one. The sense of humour is very silly, but it frequently made me smile. The puzzles are generally fairly easy and there were few points I got stuck for any length of time. Definitely worth the price and currently on sale for even less.
As others have said, the game is incredibly short - 3 hours at most really. I expected it to be short but not that short. The point at which I expected I was around half-way through the game turned out to be about 15 minutes before the end. While the earliest parts of the game around the house (for both characters) have some decent puzzles, once the story gets going you're mostly railroaded into doing "the obvious next thing". It becomes more of an interactive story where you simply need to go through the motions of what the plot has told you to do. There is a point where a character asks you to retrieve an object. You might expect there to be an obstacle, maybe a little string of puzzles to overcome said obstacle. Nope. The only thing you have to do is go to the place where you've been told the object is, click on it and then return. It strikes me as a missed opportunity for some puzzles, but maybe this is simply not what they were aiming for. On the plus side, the animation and characterisations are mostly excellent. If you think of it as a lightly interactive cartoon adventure movie then it's rather nice. Probably best to get it on sale as I did though.
