Game:

Day of the Tentacle (1993)

Duration: 59:35

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Day of the Tentacle (Metacritic 87%)

Remastered

The remastered version of Day of the Tentacle retains the cartoon-style animation but uses more detailed characters and backgrounds.
At PlayStation Experience 2014, Schafer announced that a remastered version of Day of the Tentacle was being developed by his studio, Double Fine Productions. The remaster was released on March 22, 2016, for PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, Microsoft Windows and OS X, with a Linux version released at July 11 together with a mobile port for iOS. An Xbox One port came in October 2020.

Schafer credited both LucasArts and Disney for help in creating the remaster, which follows from a similar remastering of Grim Fandango, as well by Double Fine, in January 2015. Schafer said when they originally were about to secure the rights to Grim Fandango from LucasArts to make the remaster, they did not originally have plans to redo the other LucasArts adventure games, but with the passionate response they got on the news of the Grim Fandango remaster, they decided to continue these efforts. Schafer described getting the rights to Day of the Tentacle a "miracle" though aided by the fact that many of the executives in the legal rights chain had fond memories of playing these games and helped to secure the rights. 2 Player Productions, which has worked before with Double Fine to document their game development process, also created a mini-documentary for Day of the Tentacle Remastered, which included a visit to the Skywalker Ranch, where LucasArts games were originally developed, where much of the original concept art and digital files for the game and other LucasArts adventure games were archived.

Day of the Tentacle Remastered retains its two-dimensional cartoon-style art, redrawn at higher resolution for modern computers. The high resolution character art was updated by a team led by Yujin Keim with consultation of Ahern and Chan. Keim's team used many of the original sketches of characters and assets from the two and emulated their style with improvements for modern graphics systems. Matt Hansen worked on recreating the background assets in high resolution. As with the Grim Fandango remaster, the player can switch back and forth between the original graphics and the high-resolution version. The game includes a more streamlined interaction menu, a command wheel akin to the approach used in Broken Age, but the player can opt to switch back to the original interface. The game's soundtrack has been redone within MIDI adapted to work with the iMUSE system. There is an option to listen to commentary from the original creators, including Schafer, Grossman, Chan, McConnell, Ahern, and Bajakian. The remaster contains the fully playable version of the original Maniac Mansion, though no enhancements have been made to that game-within-a-game.

Day of the Tentacle Remastered has received positive reviews, with the PC version having an aggregate review score of 87/100 tallied by Metacritic. Reviewers generally praised the game as having not lost its charm since its initial release, but found some aspects of the remastering to be lackluster. Richard Corbett for Eurogamer found the game "every bit as well crafted now as it was in 1993", but found the processes used to provide high-definition graphics from the original 16-bit graphics to making some of the required shortcuts taken in 1993 for graphics, such as background dithering and low animation framerates, more obvious on modern hardware.[ IGN's Jared Petty also found the remastered to still be enjoyable, and found the improvement on the graphics to be "glorious", but worried that the lack of a hint system, as was added in The Secret of Monkey Island remastered version, would put off new players to the game. Bob Mackey for USgamer found that while past remastered adventure games have highlighted how much has changed in gamers' expectations since the heyday of adventure games in the 1990s, Day of the Tentacle Remastered "rises above these issues to become absolutely timeless".

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