"Not Shy About Their Love"

“2 Player Reviews” is a series of articles in which two members of the Wing Damage staff separately review a game, so as to give our readers multiple perspectives on the subject matter.

Player 1 – Jonah “spambot” Gregory

One of the bigger disappointments in gaming over the last several years, for me, has been the lack of new and creative adventure games. They are finally starting to get a small comeback through the efforts of companies like Telltale Games, but for some of us, they never really went anywhere.

The independent gaming scene has seen adventure games flourish. Many fan projects have been started, and many have died, never to be finished. I find it even more exciting when an original IP comes along that can give you not only an entertaining game, but a big dose of nostalgia to boot. Enter Zombie-Cow Studios, home of “Ben There, Dan That“.

“Ben There, Dan That” stars, and was written and created by, Ben Ward and Dan Marshall. As the picture at the top of this article shows, Ben and Dan are not shy about their love of Lucasarts adventure games from yesteryear. After a short intro sequence, you are treated with the characters’ living room, which is plastered with posters of Sam and Max, “Day of the Tentacle” and “Full Throttle”.

The game uses the traditional single button interface, which can be cycled through to make your character walk, look, use, and talk. As is usual, you collect items through the game to use in solving puzzles. Unlike a lot of earlier adventure games, especially independently created ones, the puzzles are relatively straightforward and use at least some logic, even if it is in a humorous, “making fun of old adventure games” sort of way. If you do get stuck, there is a spoiler-free hint guide found on the site.

The humor of the game mostly comes through in the dialog between Ben and Dan. The two banter back and forth about their current predicament, other characters you have encountered, and even the items you have been collecting. This is where the game really shines. The writing is very tight and the banter really works. You get a real sense that these characters have already been through adventures in the past together and that, by this point, nothing really shocks them. I assume that is because it was written by two real life friends, which transferred well to their in-game counterparts. Also, it is legitimately funny. This is not as easy to pull off as some people might think, especially in the context of a video game.

The Plot is a little thin and is really just an excuse to get the two from point A to point B while making the player laugh in-between.  Ben and Dan find themselves aboard an alien spaceship and have to find objects that they can use as keys to open the doors on the ship, all of which lead to various wacky dimensions from a world overrun by zombies (though you barely see any) to one where the entire population has been turned into super-heroes. While the scenarios are fun, they are a little short. Several of them are only one room.

Overall, I had a blast playing through the game and recommend it to fellow adventure game enthusiasts. It stands above many others in the indie adventure game scene.

Player 2 – Colin “MrColinP” Panetta

Before I ever even played “Ben There, Dan That”, I was coming up with ways for this review to leverage the game’s status as being independently produced, against what I predicted to be an underwhelming experience. “How do you review an independent game?” I thought, “Do you hold it to the same standard as a game that had years of development and millions of dollars put into it? Or do you lower your standards and placate to it as if it’s lesser?” The other thing working against “Ben There, Dan That” right out of the gate, for me, is that it boldly sets itself up as following in the tradition of the LucasArts era of adventure games. Big posters of Day of the Tentacle, Sam and Max and Full Throttle adorn the protagonists’ living room and it borrows Day of the Tentacle’s “jagged spiral” motif in many of it’s backgrounds and even it’s desktop icon. I’m sure the game-makers meant this as a tribute, but it also sets their game up to be compared to those works. As it turns out, both of these concerns were moot.

“Ben There, Dan That” has a lot of really great stuff going for it, placing it above the vast majority of other independently produced adventure games that I’ve played. Mostly, it’s that it has extremely high production values and they pay off in play value. The visuals are very slick. I’ve never seen anything made with Adventure Game Studio look this good. From a technical standpoint, the title sequence really blew me away. Now, I haven’t played an AGS game in years and the program could very well have advanced considerably in that time, but regardless, this game looks good in a way that shows that its creators have a real eye for making things… look good. For example, sometimes the character sprites subtly change color to match the palette of that particular area’s background color scheme. And the attention to detail doesn’t end there. There’s a lot of incidental character animation in the game; characters using objects, background characters moving about, and so on.

Humor is very hard to pull off in video games and I think I’m an especially harsh judge of it, but a lot of the jokes in this game really work. The designers have cast themselves in the lead roles and the humor is largely of the somewhat tired “snarky British dude” variety, but they have enough personality and wit to make it enjoyable. A lot of the jokes are also adventure game based, in a kind of meta way that’s genuinely cleaver, but I imagine it goes over most people’s heads. My favorite of these being when Dan remarks on Ben’s flawless ability to determine which objects he should pick up, and which to merely leave, with a sly remark.

The game’s two biggest weak points are the backgrounds and the story. The backgrounds are very sparse and hastily drawn. Doors are proportionally too small for the characters. Making them larger would have filled up some of the glaringly empty walls above. Elsewhere, three visitable locations are strewn about randomly. Arranging them in a more composed manner would have looked, and played, more fluidly. The story is essentially one extended sequence of “use key on door” and, without any real narrative driving the events, all we have left is the gameplay and humor to entertain us. They’re pretty good, as I said, but not necessarily good enough to completely sustain the entire play time of the game. Also, the sound design is really good, but a little sparse in some places where the silence was noticeable. But these criticisms are of a type usually reserved for games with loftier origins. That you can make these criticisms of this game is a testament of how far the designers made it with so little.

A part of why I enjoyed this game so much is that my bar was set to its low “independent adventure game” setting and yours should be too. But, if you’re looking for a classic adventure-styled, independent game you can get behind, you’re not going to do much better than Ben There, Dan That.

“Ben There, Dan That” is a free adventure game available for PC at Zombie-Cow.com

Tags: 2 Player Reviews, adventure games, Ben There Dan That, independent games, Lucasarts, Point and Click, Zombie Cow

This entry was posted on Monday, February 16th, 2009 at 6:00 am and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.