The Neverhood

Fantastic style—exploring a lovingly-made claymation world (both goofy and eerie) as an expressive cartoon character set to a soundtrack of lively funky gibberish. There's nothing else quite like it. Even the Hall of Records and all its screens of bizarre Bible-by-way-of-Nickelodeon mishmash are kind of a delight. If the puzzles were good and the game didn't have so much backtracking then it'd be a perfect point-and-click adventure. Sadly, most of the puzzles are arbitrary, as if the creators sprinkled a bunch of black boxes labelled “puzzle” in their plans, then when it came time to actually define them they panicked and slapped in a fistful of textbook stuff with no connection to the story or its world. Between how dynamic the cutscenes are and how weak a lotta the mechanical stuff is, playing the game feels like watching a sluggish, overly literal cartoon. No jump cuts, no montages, none of the absurdist playfulness of animated comedy, just you watching Klaymen plod from room to room for hours.

Obligatory: Also I didn't realise just how bad Doug TenNapel is. I knew he made some anti-trans remarks at some point, but not how “being a shitheel” is the smeared throughline of his politics going back at least 15 years.