Day of the Tentacle

Published: 16 Mar 2026

Day of the Tentacle Steam banner

Day of the Tentacle (nominally a sequel to Maniac Mansion, but in practice very much a standalone game) is one of those “classic game from a classic developer” that well deserves its status as one of said classics that surely inspired numerous other game developers down the years. It is very much a “product of its time”, namely the 90s with its rather outlandish premise (stopping a mutant tentacle’s plan for world domination via extensive use of time travel and tampering of history, and it somehow involving the Founding Fathers of the USA), the main character main archetypes (mad scientist, nerd, roadie, mad medical student) - its is extremely dated, but charmingly so.

But the most amazing feat of all, is that its a 90s point-and-click adventure game that manages to feel more sensible with its puzzle design than you’d expect - both in what passed for puzzle design in said 90s point-and-click adventures, but also the highly open-ended nature of having 3 different available characters available to potentially solve puzzles - there’s always a puzzle or two that seems to rely on incomprehensible “moon logic”, but by-and-large the puzzles are relatively intuitive and the time travel gimmick here worked a lot towards this intuition, once you grasped how you could manipulate present/future time by doing something in the past (and vice versa).

It may not have the same cultural cache or lasting impact as Monkey Island, or Sam & Max - but by no means does this deserve to be relegated behind them and instead should be celebrated in its own right.