1/5 ★ – stephenhill777's review of Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders.

Fandom can be a real curse. My love for LucasArts adventure games started, as with many, by playing the Secret of Monkey Island one fateful Christmas morning. That glorious pirate adventure is one of my absolute favourite games, and indeed series, of all time. And while dalliances with other titles in the Ron Gilbert/Tim Schafer back-catalogue have led to the discovery of some real gems (Day of the Tentacle, Grim Fandango), it's clear to me why this particular title didn't merit the remake treatment. Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders has aged horribly, horribly, HORRIBLY badly. For the longest time, I believed the Sierra Kings Quest games were the bottom of the adventure game barrel because of the impossible to predict instant death sequences. Literally walking onto certain screens can cause monsters to show up and devour you without warning. However, the saving grace of that game was that, once you were dead, you knew to start again. A quick reload of your last save, and you were back in action. Zak McKracken, on the other hand, is plagued with bad design choices from the get go. First, and granted this is a product of the time, all the items in your inventory are merely words at the bottom of the screen. Later games figured out that having icons was an incredibly subtle hint system, so you could see what two things you could potentially slot together in order to make that chicken with the pulley in the middle! This would have gone a long way in solving the impenetrable logic puzzles crafted by the developers here. To make matters worse, the commands are oddly specific in some cases (PUT ON, READ) but also incredibly lacking in others. What sorry excuse of an adventure game lacks both the EXAMINE and TALK TO commands? So, the interface is an unfriendly one, but that's OK if the puzzles are up to scratch.... Sadly, that's not the case either. About 40% of the game is made up of agonizingly dull maze puzzles, as you navigate identical screens, trying to find your way in or out of jungles, pyramids, and spaceships et al. I nearly burst into tears when I realized there was a symbol I needed to take note of in the middle of a labyrinth I had just escaped from, and I needed to go back in to get it. And no, the symbols are randomized, so I couldn't check a video-walkthrough. The actual puzzles themselves are occasionally amusing, but either too simple to be memorable, or too obtuse to be solvable. One example sees you trying to get past a guard, and, well, you DO have some whiskey in your inventory, don't you? Another sees you needing to plant a flag into a stone table, place two crystals side-by-side, then read a (seemingly random) scroll with a specific character in order to make lighting strike and fuse the crystals together. Where it really, really falls apart though, is how easy the game is to soft-lock and force you to restart the entire adventure. That's right, not only are there death sequences, but it's possible to miss, sell or destroy certain items that will make your game impossible to finish. This happened to me in my first two playthroughs, something that is absolutely intolerable in modern game design. I am completely unashamed to say I resorted to a guide to eventually see the credits, because absolutely no one has the time for this sort of nonsense. Even on top of that, the game also has an insufferable CashCard system, in which you have to make sure you always have enough money to travel around the world. And considering you do almost all your travel by plane (occasionally by yak), those bills mount up pretty quickly. The implications for this can't be lost on anyone: If you have a limited amount of money in the game, you have to know exactly what to do in each area before you even begin. It is possible to win the lottery over the course of the story, and I would say that this is practically a necessity to make it to the end. To talk about the games' few good points, it's worth noting that this is a piece of gaming history. It shows LucasArts smack in the middle of their learning curve, and it's interesting to see how the mistakes they made here lead to an astronomical improvement over their next few titles. Switching between characters is something that was done better in Maniac Mansion, but it was still a unique feature at the time of this games release. And while the humour largely fell flat for me, there were one or two gags that paid off very well, particularly the one with the alien broom. Overall though, Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders simply hasn't stood the test of time. It's painfully dated, unremarkable and an absolute slog at any given moment. Watch a YouTube playthrough if you must, but don't put yourself through it.