455th played so far
Genre: Adventure
Platform: Various
Year of Release: 1988
Developer: Lucasfilm Games
Publisher: Lucasfilm Games
Time for another Lucasarts adventure! Although another early one, and the last pre-Monkey Island adventure. Happily so, as Maniac Mansion showed they didn’t seem quite as good.
Zak McKracken‘s protagonist is a journalist… for a gossipy myth-chasing publication. It sounds like something that would suit an adventure game, which is a good start already.
Our Thoughts
So I don’t really know. This is undoubtably a Lucasarts adventure. The game looks and feels like an early game. There’s no real death – other than running out of money and a few very specific scenarios. It’s funny enough in places.
Its structure probably gets me most. Aside from having very little signposting, there’s a bit too much to get and do – something that seems like it could go wrong easily, as you need to buy a lot of items with an initially limited budget.
The street to this shop isn’t that easily found, by the way – it’s a pavement beween the initial street you’re on and the bus to the airport, and you can still walk to the background without reaching the street. It’s just doesn’t seem to work.
What doesn’t help is the awkward interface.ย The version we played didn’t use the conventional verb-object method that feels pretty intuitive, with decent default options. Instead it’s an awkward, partially feedback-less verb-object-confirm interaction that feels trickier. Not helping – especially as it removes clues – is that there’s no ‘Look’ option, just a ‘what is’ that indicates the hotspots without giving less information.
It’s still fun, most of the puzzles can be solved without too much effort (once you find the places to go), with the frustrating combinations being less common. At the same time, even the effectively simple systems get marred by odd implementation. For example, there’s a dark cave you can navigate with a lighter. However, the lighter can only be on for a limited time before it gets to hot (and you have to uselessly wait for a while as it cools down) and it only lights up a small part of the screen, adding a lot of frustration to finding out what to do.
Final Thoughts
While an improvement on Maniac Mansion, Zak McKracken is not entirely there yet, not as high as we’d hope. It all plays fine, but we struggled with the interface a bit too much, and while the story is interesting, it didn’t draw us in quite far enough. There’s something interesting with character switching, but so far it didn’t seem to have mattered yet.