Having seen this game regaled as a minor classic in the adventure games
newsgroup (comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.adventure),
I thought I would give it a try. I managed to hunt down a copy of it and popped
it right in my CD drive.

You play as a “dude” named Kent, who
lives in the city of Neutropolis, which is populated by psychotically normal people.
The game opens with Kent being chucked in the slammer because he was caught whistling
a happy tune as he strolled down the avenue, and it is not normal to be so cheerful.
While in the pokey, an anonymous prisoner passes Kent a note telling him about
some kind of insurrection movement that he might want to join. Then, after a week
in the cooler, Kent is confined to his apartment and told to leave the TV on all
the time or it will be back off to prison with him. His TV, however, happens to
be on the fritz, so the first task in the game is to get it to stay on. You figure
out how to escape from your apartment and go to seek employment at the Plush Rest
furniture factory. From there, you set off on your quest to free the city from
the evils of normality. The plot in this game, while pretty silly, is quite good
and with no loose ends, so I give it an A.

Using a combination of
the keyboard and mouse, you inspect the various locales, picking up some things
and investigating others. Perspective is through Kent’s eyes in the active portions
of the game and third-person in the cut scenes. You navigate using the arrow keys,
and you can look up or down with the Page Up or Page Down keys; views are 360
degrees in the horizontal plane and maybe about 15 degrees up or down. You use
the mouse to inspect objects–right-clicking brings up a voodoo doll model of
Kent, and clicking on various body parts completes whatever action is suggested
by said body part (and it’s only from the waist up, so get your mind out of the
gutter!). Inventory is accessed by clicking on the backpack that is always displayed
in the upper right corner of the screen, and you then use the left mouse button
to apply an item. For me, the keyboard/mouse combo took a little getting used
to, and I would never have figured it out without the manual, but once I got used
to it, it was very easy to use. The game plays in the LucasArts style, where you
pick up seemingly useless items that can be creatively employed in other portions
of the game. However, this game has a lot of red herrings, which kept me a little
off balance throughout–and I liked it! Periodically, the inventory gets cleared
out due to some plot twist, so you don’t have to lug the unnecessary items to
the point of the inventory becoming unwieldy. I give gameplay an A-.

The
graphics are a mixed bag–the cut scenes are all very nicely done, but the active
scenes are pixelated to a pretty large extent. However, this game only occupies
one CD, so I suppose the bigger pixels were required to make it fit. Whatever
the case, the pixels were not so big as to obscure anything, and anyway, when
you hover your cursor over an item you can interact with, you get an on-screen
description. I think the developers could have put the game on two CDs for a very
negligible difference in production cost and a huge increase in graphic quality–this
game was only released a couple of years ago and should not look as dated as it
does. I only give graphics a B- because I think they could have been done
much better.

Next, let me talk about the voice acting. This, to me, was
the absolute worst thing about the game. I was ready to quit an otherwise decent
game several times just due to Kent’s grating on my nerves. The actor, a fellow
by the name of Corey Feldman, is some kind of Jim Carrey wannabe, but he takes
it to the nth degree and then applies a slacker surfer dude ‘tude overlay on top
of it. Now, I am a big fan of Jim Carrey, but you’ve got to admit there’s only
room in this world for one of him. If I had heard even one more “whoa, dude”
by the time I finished the game, I think I would have gotten out my flamethrower
and applied it directly to the CD. The rest of the actors did an admirable job
but were just completely overshadowed by the horrible Kent. The sound effects
and music on the game were neither intrusive nor inappropriate; they were used
in the right places and proper quantity–generally a pretty quality effort. No
doubt, d-u-u-u-des, this whole category only gets a D from me, not for
lack of effort on the part of anybody but simply for annoying the hell out of
me. I play games for entertainment, and it’s not fun to be driven buggy.

In
conclusion, this game might be considered a flawed masterpiece. It has some definite
pluses but one great big minus. I would grade it B- as a whole–I did enjoy
the style, gameplay, and story, but I would recommend that if you play it, you
turn off the volume and turn on the subtitles (it does have that option–dummy
me for not using it early in the game).

Final Grade: B-