Day of the Tentacle: Remastered

Day of the Tentacle has long been one of my favorite adventure games, and when the remastered edition came to Steam, I had to have it. Well...I had to have it once it went on sale...

It's odd to review something you've played through dozens and dozens of times. From the opening sequence, I started quoting all the dialogue. Did I mention I've played this a lot? It had been about a decade since I played it last though, so I was kind of surprised by my recollection of everything. It's ingrained.

One of the nice things about the remastered version is that it has a creator commentary track that's available on many of the screens that give you an insight into the creation process. It was really interesting to hear things like the composers were often told their music files were too massive at 32k or the fact that CD-ROMs becoming prevalent right at that time made them decide to do complete voice over for the entire game in the last month of development when the original plan was that all dialogue would appear as text.

I played the new version of this game through twice, once using the Remastered art and without commentary and once with the classic art and creator commentary overtop. I was kind of shocked because as I played the remastered version, in my mind's eye, that's what it looked like all along. That is how I remembered this game. The only kind of weirdness I noticed was when the location required the the camera to truck left or right, it seemed too smooth. It didn't seem as natural.

During my second playthrough, I turned on classic art mode, and I had to pause a moment because it was far more pixelated than I remembered. When I played the remastered Monkey Island, the opposite had happened. I turned on the remastered mode at first, and my brain absolutely rejected it, thinking, "This wasn't what this game looked like at all!" I turned on classic mode and never looked back in that case. I played Day of the Tentacle fully in classic and fully in remastered mode, and both look great, once my brain kind of acclimated to my 1993 eyeballs.

I loved this game then. I love this game now, and if you love adventure games, you should love it too. Go forth and Steam.