Ben There, Dan That

"Ben There, Dan That" is a point and click adventure game from a couple of guys who clearly have a love for old school LucasArts point and click adventure games. There's little references to the classics throughout the game. Ben and Dan's apartment, for instances, has posters up from "Day of the Tentacle", "Sam & Max", and "Full Throttle". Looking at the Day of the Tentacle poster elicits a Bernard quote of "Ooh baby, what a man.", while looking at the Sam & Max poster, Ben will talk about the "cheesy retro ambience", a la Max. I particularly liked when you looked in the mouse hole in their apartment, the character mentions that he doesn't keep money in there because that would be ridiculous. (Sam & Max reference) A bunch of little things like that stuck out to me as enjoyable just because you know you've had a shared experience with the game's creators.

I enjoyed their humor for the most part. They may have crossed a couple lines from time to time, but it was all in good fun. I will say that I don't agree on their stance that American Football sucks or that museums are boring, but they may be right on about American beer being akin to horse piss... These dudes are British, if you hadn't noticed. I guess my point is here, fuck soccer. Go 'Murica. Haha!

Regarding the visuals of the game, they appear simply drawn in a scribbly, couple steps above stickman kind of style. I don't mean this as a criticism as it was definitely distinct. I believe they made this game using Adventure Game Studio, which was of interest to me. I've wanted to create an adventure game myself, and this was a fun, enjoyable experience that was fashioned using this tool, so I will probably look into it further to potentially use it for my own purposes. Most excellent.

With gameplay, it's mostly what you would expect from a point and click adventure game but slightly paired down. You can LOOK at things, USE things, and TALK to people. That's it. There was no PICK UP, GIVE, OPEN, etc. to complicate things. USE did the job just fine. The inventory system is kind of clunky though. The object you just picked up would remain out to use rather than simply being put away in the inventory. It made it seem like you had to put it away yourself, which wasn't the case. Also, when you had several items, you had to page through your inventory because only one small line of them could be displayed at a time. This got cumbersome when you were trying to figure out which items to try to combine with each other. There were also some extra clicks necessary when trying to unselect inventory items when your combining of objects didn't work. This is all rather nitpicky though. It could have been improved, but none of this detracted from the game.

The only real technical issue I had involved the dialogue text. Each character was assigned a different color for their dialogue, and in some instances, this text blended in with the background or was some shade that made it difficult to read. For the most part, it wasn't a huge problem, but there were several characters that were slightly troublesome to read. The text speed was also iffy. I would read faster than they expected at times and click the spacebar to continue. If you pressed the spacebar too close to when the next block of text was going to appear though, it would cycle past the new text, and you'd miss it completely. Once again...being fairly nitpicky here.

"Ben There, Dan That" was a quick game, only 2 or 3 hours, but it's certainly worth giving it a go if you're a fan of the genre.