Return of the Tentacle (fan-made sequel to Day of the Tentacle)

[St_Eddie]

The first part of an episodic fan-made sequel to the outstanding Lucasarts adventure game (and a strong contender for my favourite game of all time) Day of the Tentacle, was released a few days ago.  It's developed by a bunch of German (natch) adventure game fans.

Download a copy here.

I wasn't expecting much from this fan-game because such things are usually amateur hour.  However, even though I've only played for a few minutes (it's 2:30am and I've got a busy day ahead of me tomorrow), I'm blown away by the professionalism on display.  The presentation, graphics and sound are all first class.

Again, I've only played through the introduction but an early criticism would be that the voices sound a little off from their equivalent voice actors in Day of the Tentacle (to be expected, to be fair and apparently the German voiceovers are spot on to their German DotT equivalents) and there's already an awful lot of fan wankery going on (it seems like a semi-remake in just how much it's retreading the same ground).

On that note, the locations are slightly altered versions of the same backgrounds from Day of the Tentacle.  A bit more originality wouldn't have gone amiss.  Having said that, the developers were creating these HD versions of the backgrounds way before the Double Fine remaster, which makes them a lot more impressive in that context (i.e. it's not like they ripped the HD backgrounds from the remaster).  These are minor complaints to make though, given just how impressive this fan-game is.

My biggest concern is that this is just the prologue to a larger game and I now fully expect Disney (who own all of LucasArts back catalogue) to step in and shut them down, any day now.  I think that the developers would be wise to try and team up with Double Fine (who handled the recent remaster of Day of the Tentacle) and get Disney's permission to make this an official sequel.