Developed by: The Neverhood Inc.
Release date: October 30, 1996
Platforms: PC, PlayStation (JP)
What if video games were made of clay?
The Neverhood is your typical point and click adventure game; However, it has the distinction of being made ENTIRELY out of clay. The clay looks nice, but how good is the game underneath all of it?
The story is simple: You are Klaymen, a clay man who has awoken in a desolate world, with no context as to what happened before his arrival in it. From here, you find items, solve puzzles, and slowly figure out the mystery of the Neverhood.
Visually, the game is as unique as it gets, with everything being made out of clay. Everything. Backgrounds, characters, items, EVERYTHING. All animation was done by hand with claymation. Small things like Klaymen's interactions with the environment and even his idle animations have so much character, and are super fun. Cutscenes are a great reward for making it through different parts of the game. Some even made me feel a little emotional at one point.
The music is just as unique as the graphics, with a soundtrack made by Terry Scott Taylor. His music adds a lot to the surreal vibe that the game gives off. It's a little hard for me to explain other than just saying it's really GOOD stuff, and I like it a lot.
Truthfully, as good as this game looks, I can't call it perfect. Graphics are amazing, but the gameplay I found to be quite frustrating at times. Puzzles start out simple, but get more and more tedious and almost incomprehensible at times.
There were times that I missed something, or forgot to write something down and had to walk back and forth between overly long distances, or had to skip through long repeated animations to progress. It became VERY annoying.
An example of this being a point in the game in which you have to walk to the end of a hallway to collect an item. That sounds fine and all, but the issue is that it takes TEN MINUTES to walk to the end of the hallway and back. It plays out like one of those jokes in the later episodes of Dexter's Laboratory where they just repeat a word over and over again for a minute straight.
Look, we're trolling you! We're trolling you by wasting your time! Isn't that funny?
And that's just one example. It happens several times throughout the game and really took me out of the experience.
The puzzles kind of fell flat for me, yes; But, I would like to praise the first-person portions when you travel between areas. It was a really good time to absorb the surreal atmosphere of the game. No music, just ambient sounds and your footsteps as you walk through the strange clay landscapes, well-lit despite the pitch black sky. It reminded me this weird puppet show I watched in elementary school
Although I have a lot of complaints about the game, I enjoyed it from the perspective of it being a piece of art; I just didn't enjoy actually PLAYING it as much as I could have. You can tell a lot of work was put into the Neverhood, and I'd recommend you try it out, or at the very least watch a playthrough; It isn't something you want to miss.
