The Stack

I reinstalled The Neverhood and played through a bit of it to see if my earlier comments were at all accurate. If anything, I understated things. I called the look “handmade”, but I didn’t specify that the scenery had finger gouges all over the place.

I also mentioned the impression of three-dimensionality. This goes way beyond the look of the graphics. The Neverhood goes to great pains to give an impression that the gameworld is a single continuous physical object, using the tricks employed by graphical adventures from Myst onward. You get maps, glimpses through windows of distant locations that you’ll visit later, puzzles based on adjacency of locations you can’t walk between directly, and physical manipulation of large landscape features to alter what locations are accessible. Presumably many of the backdrops were assembled and photographed individually, but some of the exterior scenes had to have been done by moving a camera around inside a large clay model. Skullmonkeys, by contrast, is clearly a disjointed series of levels assembled out of sprites. How disjointed? Travelling from level to level involves jumping into a “warp gate”. Even though some of the level graphics in Skullmonkeys are quite attractive (particularly the “Castle de los Muertos” level, which involves running across battlements in silhouette against a red sky), I have to call The Neverhood’s overall approach more impressive.

The one area where Skullmonkeys really beats Neverhood is in its framerate. The Neverhood‘s animation looks unbelievably clunky after playing Skullmonkeys for a while. It doesn’t take long to get used to it, though.

A second attempt at the last level with 94 lives yielded victory. It turned out that the last part I faced on the previous attempt (an exceedingly tightly-timed section involving two sets of moving platforms that appear when you step on a switch and disappear shortly afterward) was the very last challenge in the game.

For all its goofy amiability on the surface, Skullmonkeys is a brutally punishing game, one that cracks the whip and demands more.  Call it masochism, but there’s a great deal of satisfaction in beating a game like that.  There’s a sense of accomplishment, and also a sense of freedom in realizing that you don’t have to play it any more.

Next up: a change of pace while my left thumb heals.

It’s easy to die in Skullmonkeys. There’s no notion of “health” in this game: being hurt in any way costs a life and sends you back to the last checkpoint. Extra lives are fairly easy to come by, so success in the game hinges on whether or not you’re picking up new lives faster than you’re losing them.

Fortunately, every level has a bonus room where you can pick up more lives with little or no risk, while listening to the bonus room song, “Invisible Musical Friend”. (Hearing this for the first time is the high point of the game.) But that’ll only take you so far. The last couple of levels eat up lives like they’re candy. And that’s why there’s the 1970s.

The 1970s is a special bonus area accessible from the bonus room on level 11, but only if you’ve found three “1970” icons hidden on different levels. Why “1970s”? Mainly because it gives them an excuse to put the screen through distracting psychedelic kaleidoscope effects. It’s a very slippery level, consisting mostly of bottomless abyss with small platforms, many of which act like conveyor belts so you can’t stand still on them. Because it’s a bonus area, you don’t get to try again if you fall off. You just get thrown into level 12 with no possibility of going back. To understand how inconvenient this is, you have to understand one thing about the game’s save system: it doesn’t have one. It’s old-school enough to simulate saving by giving you a status code whenever you finish a level. You don’t get a code at the beginning of the 1970s. If you fall off, the only way to get back in is to play all the way through level 11.

But if you do make it all the way through the 1970s without falling off, you wind up in a roomful of extra lives. I reached this today, and wound up with a full load of 99 lives to squander.

When I reached the final level, I still had 94 lives. I still have not competed the game. The final level consumed them all.

As I start this blog, I am finishing up Skullmonkeys, an old-fashioned 2D platformer for the Playstation. In fact, it was already old-fashioned when it was new: it was released in 1997, just after Mario 64 and Tomb Raider on their respective consoles ushered in the age of the 3D platformer.

Even though it was a critical failure and a commercial bomb that killed the company that made it, this was one of the first games I sought out when I finally bought a PS2 in 2004. I wanted it because it was the sequel to a game I liked a great deal, The Neverhood, which is a puzzle-based third-person adventure game for the PC. Apparently the creators of The Neverhood thought that the best way to correct the disappointing sales figures of the first game was to switch to a more popular genre and platform, thereby alienating half of the fans of the original and making it impossible for the rest to play it. It’s a bit jarring that Klaymen (the hero) is suddenly able to shoot energy blasts that make his enemies explode. He never did that before.

The grand concept behind The Neverhood was that it’s all made of clay: the characters, the environment, even machines and buildings. It was a striking and original look, and the designers emphasized it by leaving the clay rough and wobbly, just so you never forgot that they had molded it all by hand (unlike the smoothed-out models used by Aardman, for example). Skullmonkeys is similar, but in lower resolution and with parallax scrolling. Oddly, parallax scrolling messes up the claymation look more than the lower resolution does, making the scenery look more like a collage than a three-dimensional space.

Graphics aren’t everything, of course. Except they are in this game. It’s all about style, not gameplay.

I have managed to reach the last of the game’s seventeen levels, but without enough lives to actually get anywhere near the end. I am currently trying to get more lives from the 1970s.