Day of the Tentacle was a very, very funny point-and-click adventure in 1993, and it remains funny today. The plentiful jokes are punchy, wickedly morbid, and delightfully diverse enough to satisfy a wide range of comedic palates.

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Witty one-liners are delivered with deliberately cartoonish voice acting performances reminiscent of prime-time adult animation; I couldn’t help thinking of Futurama as I played. There’s a wonderfully on-the-nose, irreverent nature to the whole venture, with a tone alternating between literal potty humor and dry, sardonic wit. Day of the Tentacle weaves disparate elements together in a wonderful self-parody of video game logic. The slapstick vibe also helps make acts of ridiculous cruelty more palatable. Day of the Tentacle is, after all, a game that requires you to cryogenically freeze and then microwave a hamster.

Time Hijinks

Almost every item examined or conversation initiated becomes a rolling gag. Even an interrupted suicide attempt somehow turns humorous, pivoting between novelty sight gags and a pretentious discussion of Nietzschean philosophy. The protagonists are perfectly paired with the goofy, deadpan dialogue. Nerdy Bernard, Hoagie the wisecracking roadie, and the weirdo Laverne all seem in on the joke, and a supporting cast of well-voiced, quirky supporting characters like the self-absorbed Dr. Fred and a group of feuding American Founding Fathers are consistently on-point. Loading

Each of the three protagonists spends most of the adventure stuck in either the past, present, or future, with the Edison residence serving as a constant geographic frame of reference. It’s hard to get lost, and you can travel pretty freely throughout the house and grounds from early on, exploring almost every room of the first two time periods without solving a single substantial puzzle. Mundane obstructions like locked doors are rarely encountered. Instead, the gates to story progress are mostly built around obtaining the puzzle items you need to manipulate the characters you meet into doing what you need them to do: chopping down trees, spitting out dentures, or weaving the American flag into an impromptu character costume.

Puzzling It Out

All three main characters are blessed with an oblivious aura that both mirrored and facilitated my inquisitiveness as I probed the puzzles. The kids are spread out over several centuries of time-travel antics, so there’s a lot of potential for inspired puzzle building. Need vinegar in the 18th century? Drop a bottle of wine into a time capsule, open it up a few hundred years in the future after it has corrupted, and then use a time-machine toilet to flush the vinegar back into the past. The interplay between eras is explored in several clever and hilarious ways for puzzle and comedic effect. Loading

Avoiding one of the common pitfalls of the genre, almost every combination of items and actions makes some kind of logical sense, and most left me feeling clever for discovering them. A few, however, require truly epic efforts of abstract deductive reasoning that may be frustrating. Some conversation-oriented puzzles, while ridiculously amusing, can also feel obtuse. In-game cutscenes offer some helpful hints, but you’re likely to get stuck for a while and may need to step away and ponder before an answer clicks in your brain.

“ Day of the Tentacle Remastered’s graphics are completely redrawn in detailed, high-definition 2D, and the results look glorious.

The solutions never feel piecemeal or random, but they’re occasionally unintuitive. With no in-game hint system to fall back on, you might have to consult a guide to complete the most difficult challenges, like the late-game mummy-in-the-beauty-pageant puzzle. A dynamic hint system would have been a welcome addition to the remaster.

Day of the Tentacle Remastered’s graphics are completely redrawn in detailed, high-definition 2D, and the results look glorious. The colorful, highly stylized images are rendered with a care evocative of quality TV animation. For those who prefer classical pixel art, a single button transitions seamlessly to the original version on the fly. Plus, the developer commentary by the original creators and concept art gallery shouldn’t be missed when you play this outstanding classic.