Professor Crackbrain - And the awakening of the weredog

BottomLine at the Top:

Short Maniac Mansion inspired P&C from a new indie developer. Has its ups and downs, worth it if you simply must play every P&C game ever...:cough:raiseshand:cough...!

Intro:

This game was provided for free by the developer for review. As always, thanks for that!

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Pros:

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-Lots of object interactivity
-Mostly good flow
-Steam screenshot functionality works

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Meh...:

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-Inventory interactions are clunky. To deselect an object you have to first select it again. Could be made smoother.
-No Steam achievements. Not a big achievement guy myself but I think this game could have used them.
-Artificial voices sound weird. I saw another reviewer call these vocaloids (learn something new everyday!). Whatever they are, they're not ready for primetime in a game yet. At least not this one. Partial pass as voice acting is usually one of the more expensive things to do in a P&C or any game for that matter.
-Story and dialogue both feel kind of stale.
-Weird inclusion of acapella singer characters and music. I get the impression the developer is either a fan or in a group themselves.

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Cons:

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-4 save slots. I have committed to pointing this out in any P&C made in the last 10 years.
-No Autosave. Also a big sin.
-Everything takes foreverrrrr... Transitions between scenes TOO LONG. Pick something up? TOO LONG. Switch to cutscene? TOO LONG. I feel like I would have completed this game an hour sooner had I not had to do all this waiting.

Final Thoughts:

Clearly a passion project. Despite the shortcomings overall a decent first entry from a new developer, I am curious to see what they will come up with in the future! If buying at full price know that you are supporting an indie developers first entry, temper expectations and thanks for supporting the indie P&C development community!

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Great little adventure game. Would be cool to play it with the 7+ younguns as a Halloween treat maybe as it's pretty family safe with some cool puzzles. Then again....maybe not if you have a cat. Or a parrot. Or dogs. Yeah. It's not dog friendly.
But kids love this mildly spooky stuff in a cozy environment!
I got really stuck once, but there are plenty of walkthroughs available should you be time constrained.
Puzzles are a mix of practical and 'I can't believe that worked! Poor cat!'
It's a little clunky, but I didn't have a single bug, and it gave me quite a few laugh out loud moments. The mixed real/Ai VO may irritate some, but I thought it was fine and the Dev is being upfront about it, and you can always turn it off.
The singing, however, is great and a very welcome surprise.
Remember there's a 'FULL SCREEN' button on the home page, and it played flawlessly for me on a 4K screen.
The Dev clearly enjoyed making this quirky spooky game. Happy to recommend.

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Professor Crackbrain and the Awakening of the Weredog is a game that's been heavily influenced by Maniac Mansion, and is pretty proud of that fact.

It's not going to impress you with its graphics – they're that retro pixel art style designed to evoke memories of classic Nintendo and early PC titles. Odds are, this isn't going to bug you, and it's not like they're hiding the fact. If you're on their store page, it's plain to see. The graphics are fine, but I will point out that the game is windowed, and that window is small. Muddy graphics don't do it any favors.

There's actually voiced dialogue, which is a genuine surprise. The voice work is...okay. You can enable it in the options, where it's tagged with “mostly AI”. Given that these are vocaloids, it's a surprising inclusion. However, the fact they're vocaloids means that the delivery is flat and uninspired. There's little reason to play with sound, to be very honest.

On every screen, there's a minimum of several things to interact with, including the standard “examine” option which usually leads to your character making a joke of some form, or referencing something from the 80's or 90's. Not to sound cruel to the game, but this is almost definitely where you're going to decide whether or not the game is for you. The dev is banking on you finding this funny or charming. The problem is that both of these things are very subjective. For me, it just became a never-ending stream of references which added little to the game, beyond reminding me that it wasn't these things. The humor never really hit for me either. Perhaps it was the way the lines were written. Perhaps the jokes would have been funnier if a human had said them, rather than a vocaloid. Either way, almost every attempt at humor fell very flat for me. (Aside from the monkeywrench joke, that is.)

One bright side is the QoL option to hit the spacebar and see every hotspot on the screen. Given that we're playing in a small window with low-res graphics, that's actually a really nice idea. Of course, there's more than a few times when you realize words are overlapping due to how much stuff is there, or that you literally have a two pixel hotspot to actually click on. It feels like the dev had a ton of ideas and didn't want to pull any item or joke out of the game, and unfortunately left it overcrowded as a result.

The game is very straightforward – it's a puzzle heavy adventure game, just like Maniac Mansion or the Monkey Island series. So if you're not a fan of those games, this one's not going to change your mind. If you are, though, you'll potentially get some enjoyment from this. A lot of it banks on nostalgia, and this is really a genre you like, this is a much easier recommendation to make.

I don't want it to seem like I'm punching down here; I'm not. This is obviously a one or two person passion project, and it's far better than anything I'm likely to do in my lifetime, in terms of game creation. Just be aware that this is VERY much a no-budget indie game. It's meant to be a classic adventure title in terms of gameplay, complete with every trope in the genre, for better or worse. By all means, support this title if you have a few extra bucks. It's earnestly made, and I can tell that a lot of love went into it. It gets an A for effort, but a C for execution. I'd love to see what this dev could do with an actual budget or some higher-end tools.