A while ago PlayStation gave out free copies of the \u201cremastered\u201d Day of the Tentacle, so I\u2019ve been playing that
The original came out in 1993, and referenced the 1988 Maniac Mansion it sequeled (and the inexplicable Canadian sitcom spinoff that came in between). So there\u2019s some culture lag and that\u2019s interesting
Not so much at object-level so far: it\u2019s only partly \u201ccontemporary\u201d, in parallel with Apocalypse Future and Founders-era past, and that that \u201ctoday\u201d has landline phones and DOS computers seems like a natural part of the already-retro vibe, \u201cmad science\u201d and Elvis and the same vein of midcentury Weird that the B-52s and the swing/burlesque revivals drew from.
This one player character though, premed sophomore Laverne, is so particularly 1993 it\u2019s killing me. Her personality felt hard to place until I realized it\u2019s a combination of things that I\u2019m used to seeing after the fact as distinct period tropes \u2013 she\u2019s like halfway between the aetherial ditziness of Phoebe Buffay and the dark bitterness of a Janeane Garofalo character but NOT in a flattering way, like someone assembled a MPDG backwards. Her character animation looks like Delerium of the Endless as drawn in a Slave Labor Graphics book, and all in all I\u2019m starting to think of her as the eponymous girl from The Presidents of the United States of America\u2019s Lump. It\u2019s amazing.
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