For example, in one puzzle Klaymen is shrunk and you have to make a potion that will return him to his normal size. And you will have to back track, because the puzzles in The Neverhood make no damn sense. Klaymen's indoor walking pace is leisurely at best, which makes back tracking a nightmare. Hitting the space bar skips through the walking animation, but it doesn't help with navigation. All of these segments are frustrating to navigate and ass-ugly due to crappy video compression. When Klaymen heads outside though, the camera shifts to a first person perspective and things are decidedly less pretty.
The inside areas are traditional 2D point and click adventure fare, and they look swell. Unfortunately, The Neverhood is a game of style over substance. The greatest venting of gas in game history and some scenery that was obviously inspired by a bag of Cheeto's. All of the music from The Neverhood and it's sequel Skullmonkeys is compiled on a 2 disc set called Imaginarium: Songs from the Neverhood ?. Taylor also uses scat and onomatopoeia in place of true lyrics, giving the songs life without making them human. The bouncy percussion, playful sax and jangly acoustic guitars get lodged squarely inside the brain of anyone fortunate enough to hear them. Scott blends folk, pop and plain old weirdness to create music that merges perfectly with the game's visual style. Terry Scott Taylor wrote and performed all the songs, and they are as wonderfully warped as the world they inhabit. Oh, and just for the record, if you see an sign in The Neverhood that reads, "Danger! Don't go down the drain! You will die!" you had best pay heed.Ĭharming as the game's appearance is, the soundtrack trumps it. Willy Trombone's air-headed nature is represented by a hole in his yellow noggin and Klog, Klaymen's vile foil, is appropriately spiny and distorted. Willy Trombone shows his love for Klaymen by dropping a flower pot on him. He also unleashes the longest belch in video game history, something I'm sure TenNaple includes on his resume. Klaymen, the elegantly designed protagonist, always uses gravity to his advantage when descending stairs.
Claymation and slap-stick go hand-in-hand and humor thrives here. Cut scenes are compressed to the point of graininess, but they retain the personality of classic claymation series such as Wallace and Gromit ?, so it's all good.Īs the brainchild of Earthworm Jim ? creator Douglas TenNaple ?, The Neverhood is weird place. The Neverhood was the first game to do claymation well, using the extra power of the PC to keep lines crisp and animation smooth. Claymation had been tried in earlier video games, such as Interplay's 16-bit game ClayFighter ?, but the limited memory of the SNES made for digitized lines and choppy animation. All of the characters and environments in The Neverhood were crafted lovingly out of clay and brought to life with stop motion animation.
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