Game:

Toonstruck (1996)

Category:

Let's Play

Duration: 3:19:39

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0

Originally recorded: June 12, 2022

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Welp, I'm finally onto my first bonus game of 2022. Admittedly, I was kind of digging the reduced schedule I had for awhile there... simply because it allowed me more time to focus on my burgeoning side-project: Back the Log Off! But since I don't really have any excuse to hold back anymore, it's time to go back to twice-weekly streams and hope that I can find some way to serve both interests for the time being. I'm just lucky that most of this year's bonus games seem to be relatively short.


But enough talking shop: let's dig into the game itself. Toonstruck is one of those old-time PC games that always fascinated me on its sheer premise alone. Christopher Lloyd plays a down-on-his-luck cartoonist that gets sucked into his own creation? Sign me up, man. There's even a whole host of recognizable voice actors that were prevalent throughout the 1990s -and- they got freaking Nelvana to do the animation! This should be another game that I should be ashamed to not play sooner, yet I feel like the sheer presentation alone warrants playing the game on livestream.


It doesn't hurt that the game doesn't go full "moon logic" with its puzzles. Sure, I got stuck a few times... but fortunately, Dari's compromise of using hints instead of just copy-pasting sections from a walkthrough works out better for me. Hopefully, he sticks to something like that if I ever stream any more point-and-click adventure games that don't outright require a guide to decode the vast majority of the puzzles.


Unfortunately, I did run into something catastrophic near the end of this first session. Upon trying to grab one last item Dari suggested I grab, the mouse seemed to disappear... which outright killed my ability to interact with the game world. And I hadn't saved since the very beginning of the game. Fortunately, since I was able to skip most of the dialogue and cutscenes, I was able to recreate my progress in... what honestly feels like record time. I'm just not happy about the whole affair. Sadly, I feel like this was the best possible outcome: I pride myself on avoiding "grind sessions" and other forms of "movie magic" offstream to hide some of the more tedious elements of certain games. As far as I'm concerned, a livestream means that my audience is along for the ride, for the exciting parts and the boring ones. I'll admit, I was lucky to have recreated all of my progress in roughly 10 minutes. It's just a bit sobering to realize just how boring a Toonstruck speedrun would have to look in the process.

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