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.”
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!”
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!”