Edna
Konrad is a young lady attached to only two things in life: her billowy
hospital gown and her terrycloth pet rabbit Harvey. Our mind-melded
heroes begin their adventure locked in a padded cell on the top floor
of an asylum housed in a dilapidated Victorian mansion. Of course,
Edna has been wrongfully detained for about the last ten years, but
today is the day she and Harvey are breaking out. With your considerable
assistance, of course. Because, as the box copy for the game loudy
proclaims, Edna & Harvey: The Breakout is indeed an old-schoolish
point-and-click adventure, of the mostly LucasArts kind. Heck, there’s
even a short list of action verbs pasted across the bottom of the
screen and a pop-up inventory grid to bring a tear to the eye of Ron
Gilbert.

The game designers also
boast about the hand-drawn graphics and the lack of a third dimension
in the game engine. The game’s brightly colored graphical style is
charming and the 2D cartoon sprites were plenty animated enough for
me. This is a third-person pick-up-everything-and-talk-to-everyone
game. You and Edna and Harvey are first going to bust out of that
cell, then out of the building, then out of… Well, let’s say this
game is just busting out all over. Once the three of you make it out
of the cell, you start to run into all sorts of colorful, wacky characters,
either other inmates or asylum employees. Your fellow inmates can
help you, but the asylum folks are mostly out to catch you. There’s
even one brief timed sequence early on in the game. Otherwise, most
of the puzzling consists of picking items up, using them and combining
them, as well as picking up useful info from any NPCs you run into.
Which is to say, sometimes you can’t do something until you’ve talked
to the right person.

The
classic LucasArts adventure made an artform of the loopily logical
puzzle, as well as the hilarious “wrong” answer. Sometimes
you laughed when you finally realized which item would make the chicken
lay the egg, and sometimes you laughed when you tried to “talk”
to the chicken, or tried to “iron” the chicken, or tried
to “screwdriver” the chicken. In a LucasArts classic, every
mistake is a golden opportunity for a great gag line. Which is what
made (and still makes) playing them so much fun. Edna & Harvey
makes a good stab at reproducing this type of zany atmosphere. The
puzzles aren’t as brilliant as the ones in
The Day of the Tentacle and the gag lines are’t as funny
as the ones in The
Curse of Monkey Island, but they’re still entertaining.

The game mercifully has
little to no pixel-hunting and the puzzles are a good blend of easy,
moderate and a couple of head-scratchers. My only quibble is with
one puzzle that I didn’t quite think the cartoony graphics supported.
On the other hand, the game designers did a good job of mixing up
the types of puzzles and even tossed in a few newish wrinkles. (Don’t
want to give anything away, but at one point later in the game it
helps to know how to drive a manual transmission.) There are also
a few “tempomorph” scenes, wherein Edna and Harvey “return”
to Edna’s past to retrieve an important memory which will help her
in the present. One of these allows you to play alternately as Edna
and Harvey, but mostly these are Harvey’s scenes not only to shine
but to walk around. Back in the present, you see, Harvey does only
two things, dangle at the end of Edna’s arm, and comment. Edna can
talk to Harvey whenever she likes and can ask his opinion of anything,
but he’ll also throw in a wisecrack or an observation whenever he
feels like it.

The
box copy is also right that E&H will probably take you a few days
to a week to complete. They didn’t even include a help system. Now,
that’s old-school. The version I played even came in an old-fashioned
box, on a DVD, with a bonus poster and a bonus soundtrack CD. I confess
I never popped the CD into my optical drive, but I did like the selections
as I was playing. The mostly jazzy music is charmingly low key and
jaunty, and best of all, unobtrusive.

Perhaps where the game
shines most, and where it most closely approaches the LucasArts ideal,
is in the voiceovers. Once again, this is a game made in Germany being
ported to English. Often, this formula bodes ill. However, this is
one time when they did a great job. Not only are the actors expert
and lively, but the “idiom” is not warmed over German. Okay,
a few German words made it through un-Anglicized, but mostly they
nailed it.

This
is especially heartwarming because Daedalic are also the folks, or
volks, who recently gave us
The Whispered World. And the main shortcoming of that game
was the English voiceover. As a matter of fact, long before I came
across the Whispered World plug planted in Edna & Harvey, I realized
that the two games have more in common than their German developer.
Both Edna and the young hero of Whispered World are misunderstood
nobodies trying to break out of their restrictive worlds. Both Edna
and Sadwick have cute sidekicks and both games play around with the
notion of the real versus the imagined world.

Edna & Harvey
doesn’t do as good a job with its story as did The Whispered World.
The latter has a surprising and satisfactory ending, while the former
— well, I’ll just say that Edna & Harvey writes itself
into a bind at the end. For most of the game, all is a lark. Edna
and Harvey have a great time either destroying or badmouthing everything
and everyone in a rather sunny manner that never seems to harm anyone
or anything. Of course, all through the game you realize that this
is a young lady who really believes her stuffed rabbit toy is a sentient
being. As if that weren’t troubling enough, the game takes a decidedly
dark turn at one point, dealing with real insanity and real psychopathy.
Frankly, it not only goes too far, but runs smack into a narrative
dead end. The writers and designers try to have it both ways, both
sunny and dark, and it trips them up. They would have been better
off following the route of the classic stage play and movie about
that other talking rabbit named Harvey
— leaving it up to our imaginations.

The
break-out-of-the-asylum storyline is also not the freshest plot. The
best Let Me Out of Here I’m Not Crazy adventure I know of is the classic
Sanitarium.
That is a truly eerie gaming experience and does a brilliant job turning
the “subconscious” and psychosis into a rich, intriguing
game world. Another worthwhile game of this ilk is the AGS game Mind’s
Eye, which has a story very similar to Edna & Harvey,
only it has a male protagonist and a far more sober tone, and no pet
rabbit. I would also toss in here the excellent game
made of Harlan Ellison’s great science fiction story “I
Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.” There’s no actual asylum
in that extended nightmare, because the entire universe has been turned
into a prison and everyone left alive is insane.

Technically speaking, E&H‘s
game engine also seems to be a throwback to the Nineties. The game
did hang from time to time, usually when loading saved games. For
that matter, there are only nine save slots, which is a bit too retro.
Other than that I didn’t experience any serious glitches on my modest
laptop. Though I did wonder why the game’s German demo has an option
to play in a window which the English full game lacks. The specs,
as you can see below, aren’t terribly demanding, but the installed
game took up five and a half gigs of space not the one gig listed.

Edna
& Harvey makes a mostly successful try at recreating the classic
LucasArts era cartoon adventure. Its few shortcomings don’t keep it
from being an entertaining romp. The author went to extraordinary
lengths to write a unique response for most of the interactions in
the game. At times this might drive you batty because it makes it
harder to tell what is important and what isn’t, but if you’re the
type who likes to roam around a game world trying everything you can
think of, this game will richly reward such an excursion. I even stumbled
across a couple of Easter eggs (I assume), something I almost never
do. I don’t want to give away those either, but suffice to say it’s
worth your while to swap for the really cool striped potholders. They
won’t help you a whit to advance in the game, but progress isn’t everything,
you know. Sometimes style counts as well.

All of which boils down
to a letter grade for Edna & Harvey of B plus. Th-th-that’s
all, folks!

System Requirements:

• OS: XP SP2 and above,
  Vista, Win7
• Processor: 1Ghz CPU
  (Core 2, equivalent or newer)
• Memory: 512 MB
• Disc Space: 1 GB
• Video: 64 MB DirectX
  Compatible Video Card
• Sound: DirectX Compatible
  Sound Card