Game Review: Day of the Tentacle - Remastered

The past is another country to which you can never return.

It is a million years ago, and my brother and I have just spent all of our pocket money (and a good deal of next year's) on a state-of-the-art PENTIUM 75 desktop. With 200MB of hard drive space, and more RAM than we'd ever seen (8MB), it was a beast. We chose it because it came with a CD-ROM Drive. Sure, we told mum and dad that the Encarta Encyclopedia would help with our studies - but really, we wanted the games! X-Wing! Zork! And, of course, Day of the Tentacle!

So, twenty-mumble years later, there's a remastered version available for free on PlayStation Now - with a Directors' Commentary! - how does it compare to my memory?

Much like the remastering of The Secret of Monkey Island the graphics have been lovingly recreated so they look identical to how I remember them. Gorgeous globs of cartoon colour brightening up the darkest day.

The jokes are still silly, good natured, and have aged pretty well. The puzzles are (mostly) pretty logical, with plenty of clues along the way.

The weird thing is, I remembered some of the solutions. How come I can remember that putting a jumper in a tumble drier for 400 years will shrink it to the size of a hamster - but not what my credit card PIN is? Brains, eh!?

I've no idea how my brother and I completed it all those years ago. We must have got stuck, but we didn't have the Internet to help us work through some of the more obtuse puzzles. Did we write down every combination we tried? Did we ask the other kids in school for help? Did we write in to a magazine and then wait a month?

I've no idea.

As it happens, my wife and I only got truly stuck twice (getting the mouse, and getting the crowbar) and - after an hour of patient and logical shouting at each other - looked up a walkthrough.

The Directors' Commentary is pretty good - a jumble of insights from the people who originally made the game. It occasionally turns into "do you remember who coloured that pixel green?" but provides some interesting anecdotes about the making of the game and the technology behind it.

I remember getting months of entertainment out of the game. But it was all over and done with in a couple of evenings. The human memory is a fickle friend.