Japanese Playstation front cover:
The Neverhood is worth studying.
Not very many things in the 90’s were like The Neverhood, but The Neverhood is very much of the 1990’s.
It’s a puzzle game with bones similar to Myst, which are usually designed to make the player feel smart for solving the puzzles, but the story has a central theme of stupidity.
The gameplay is fairly shallow, again it’s mostly learn-and-apply-knowledge or solve the soup cans type puzzles, but they made the graphics in a tremendously time and labor intensive way purely for the aesthetic of it. It got funded, developed, published and distributed because “let’s do something creative and out there.”
It really is a unique experience that IMO highlights how gaming is its own artistic medium.
I thought the story was nice and wholesome.
The story itself (creator being creates an environment and friends to make himself happy, one of the creations usurps him, another creation usurps the usurper, we all live happily ever after) is about as wholesome as creation myths get, but…
All of the characters are brand new beings who haven’t invented thinking about stuff yet, so they have this innocent stupidity to them. “You’ve got to, like, save the world or something, man; I dunno.” The good ending features the creator being saying “It is now time to GOOF OFF!”
Terry Scott Taylor’s musical contributions are still, for me, crucial daily listening
It’s just such a great mix of silly skits and catchy little tunes. I love it.
The art and writing of this is by the same guy who did Earthworm Jim.
It’s a shame he’s a Trump supporting anti-LGBTQ piece of shit.
Oh man, I didn’t know he was MAGA.
That’s really too bad.
I am Ukrainian, I have not been able to listen to Pink Floyd since the russian invasion began in 2014 because Roger Waters is a massive piece of shit that supports russian genocidal imperialism.
I played this with my kids. Everyone in the family had a puzzle they could solve the best, mine was the water fountain that made the sounds. I’d always get called in to solve that one.
I loved this game back in the day. Been meaning to try to get it working on my PC but last time I tried it was pretty stubborn
Use SCUMMVM. It runs even better than in the old machines.
I’ll check it out, thanks!
I do remember beating the game in the last ~10 years (it definitely wasn’t the 90s or 2000s). This might have been on Windows 7, but as others have mentioned, I might have used SCUMMVM.
To this day, the song Operator Plays a Little Pingpong from the Neverhood OST is my ringtone.
