The Neverhood; A Different Kind of Never Never Land. You Had Me at Claymation
Stephen Jacobs
Pity me, for I bear the dreaded Trifecta of Geekdom; obsessions with animation, science-fiction and computer games.
Animation came first, of course. Not just the Warner Brothers of hallowed Saturday mornings and the inevitable Rudolph and other Christmas puppetoons, but anything animatronic; display window shoemaker elves, dead presidents chattering away in Disneyland, you name it. In the 90’s, I almost completed an MFA in computer animation, but that’s another tale for another time
Science-Fiction came soon after, with vivid memories of getting to stay up late on a road trip to watch the “Spock’s Brain” episode and getting “I, Robot” from the book rack in the hotel to read. I was about eight then and this vice led to years in high school working at the long defunct “Chaos Unlimited” used SF and Mystery bookstore in DC. The proprietor was the boyfriend of one of my physics teacher’s Dungeons and Dragons buddies. We high school lab assistants played this middle-aged posse of educators and Interpol agents (I did say DC, right) in church basement campaigns on weekend evenings (just get’s worse, doesn’t it?).
Computers entered my life, as a middle-schooler in the 70s, as tools for com-munication. As I was stunningly dysgraphic (think of dyslexia for handwriting.) My mother of blessed memory typed all my homework for me until the Apple IIe arrived in my home with a word processor. (Those of you who missed typewriters, correction tape and fluid, and the pure hell of retyping the same damn thing over and over again for a clean copy of a final draft have no idea of how blessed you are.) Computer games came immediately afterward. Particularly story-based adventure games, since games at that time tended to be two polar opposites; long text-adventures with deep story or simpler space, arcade and platform type games. The latter were less popular with me as they generally required better hand-eye co-ordination then your average dysgraphic had.
So decades later, when Dreamworks Interactive released an adventure game set in an alternate universe built entirely in clay and animated via traditional stop-motion techniques, there was no way I could pass it by. I had to have The Neverhood (sometimes also written as NeverhoOd but TNH from hereon)
Outstanding in its Klayfield
TNH was, and is, a critical standout in the history of the adventure game genre. IGN gave it a 10, Moby Games’ Moby Rank (an aggregation and average of numerous reviews) is 85/100 and the player community gives it a 4.1 out of 5.
TNH’s design and gameplay are not only classic adventure game, but owe much to Myst. While the world of TNH is not as empty as the Myst island, it’s sparsely populated. Like Myst, many of the puzzles to be solved involve the player using some control that actually affects something far away. The only indication of an action’s result is often a sound effect off in the distance. TNH’s back story isn’t communicated in books, a la Myst, but in “video discs” scattered around the island and literally written on the walls in the game.
In Myst the game is played in first person perspective, without an avatar. TNH has a lead character, Klaymen, who speaks only once in the entire game, and near the end at that. Both games make a lot of use of ambient sound and sound effects, though some places in the world of TNH have rich acoustic music playing, rooted in traditional forms like blues and jazz but more surrealistic, matching the look of the game. If a given song has vocals, the lyrics are often difficult to make out, or make no sense at all. It’s as if they’re sung by the love child of Tom Waitts and Leon Redbone who’s deep in his cups and scat-singing along to the music.
What TNH has in spades over Myst, is a sense of humor that doesn’t quit. The creative team (also called The Neverhood) was led by Doug TenNapel; a renaissance-man artist and writer. TenNapel’s career output spans games, television, graphic novels and film. His creations best-known to gamers are the iconic Earthworm Jim games and television show. The look and feel of TNH was drawn from a 1988 exhibition of 17 of TenNapel’s paintings called “A Beautiful Day in the Neverhood.”
TNH came about after TenNapel and his team left Shiny and ended up, according to the “making of” video that comes with the game, pitching Steven Spielberg in his house on a new game. As a result of that pitch session, TNH was the first videogame title from Dreamworks Interactive, the joint venture formed between Dreamworks, SKG and Microsoft, with the latter acting as the game’s distributor.
Though Klaymen is silent, that doesn’t keep TNH from being a story-driven game. All 25,000 words of back-story are written into the walls in the Hall of Records; a 38 screen long hallway the player must traverse at one point to collect a video disc. This history on the walls is not crucial to the game, but the one on the video discs is. They tell the story of the current crisis of TNH, the one that Klaymen must solve if TNH is to survive.
Feats of Klaymen
After a seemingly random opening title sequence (viewing it again after the game is played shows that it actually gives you a first peek at key items in the game) , the first thing we see is a Pepto-Pink clay room with a baby-blue, off-kilter window frame, a lever, a button and a door with a giant mallet suspended above it. A Dixielandish theme plays, full of horns, banjo and tuba. Sleeping on the floor in the corner between the lever and the door is our hero, Klaymen. Klaymen has a white humanoid body with a red duck’s beak for a mouth, two vertical slashes for eyes and a brown tuft on his head. He wears a bright red tunic with white ball accents and some small brown shorts. His hands and feet are large and the fingers on his right hand are brown. A click of the mouse pointer, which looks like it’s also made of clay, brings the sleepy and loose-limbed Klaymen to his feet. Click again and Klaymen will move in the direction of the click. His basic walk cycle is reminiscent of a “truckin” Robert Crumb character and he comes to a stop with a slightly
stomping shuffle.
A press of the button opens the window. Click on the open window and the game’s camera shifts from 3rd person to first person POV, something that is a regular feature of TNH, as this switch will happen often, especially when you’re looking around and navigating a space vs. getting Klaymen to interact with something. When we look out the window, we see a landscape of light and dark green spiraled grass, trees with spindly, twisted brown trunks topped by mushroom-shaped caps or Tootsie-Pop round balls, all in variegated greens, with reddish-brown mesa-colored mountains in the distance.
Pulling the lever once will bring the giant mallet slamming into the blue door panel, denting the heck out of it. Two more pulls blows it off the hinges and Klaymen can make his way into the next room.
The next room is blue with pink accents. Klaymen walks out onto a lofted platform near the ceiling with a ladder to the floor. Suspended from the ceiling are five brass rings suspended by ropes. Underneath the platform is a large, round Avocado-colored plant with maws like a Venus Fly-Trap. Across the room is a door.
Jumping straight off the balcony lands Klaymen into the maws of the plant, which spits him out after a few moments. Klaymen will be battered, bruised and mangled throughout the game, but being made out of clay has its advantages, he just bounces back or reassembles.
In fact, there’s only one place in the entire game that Klaymen can die and if that happens the player has to restart the game. At one. point Klaymen will need to to descend into a drained lake (actually several times, but a player is only likely to do the forbidden act the first time they explore) and will come across the actual drain. It is well marked with thee signs that say “Danger! Don’t Jump In The Drain! You Will Die! Of course most gamers will do it anyway just to see what happens. Telling what happens would be cheating, but if you’re going to try it you’d better save your game first.
Learning that Klaymen is invulnerable (for all intents and purposes) frees you up to explore TNH and try anything that comes to mind. This is important when a game is as unusual as this one is, because you’ll need to really experiment to prevail.
Walking Klaymen over to the door and pushing the button next to it will get Klaymen punched so hard by a hidden boxing glove on a spring that it knocks him through the air, all rectangular and hard-edged for a moment, before he bounces gently on the floor.
On the floor of the room, Klaymen can jump up and grasp the rings, pulling them down with his weight. Doing so may or may not activate something in the room or elsewhere. The fourth ring from the platform will actually hold the door open, but only as long as Klaymen holds it and his weight counterbalances the door. As soon as he lets go to leave, the door slams shut.
Traveling down the ladder will take Klaymen to a platform under the house with a mailbox and a trash can. Music in TNH is localized to places, and many of them have no music in the background. So as we descend the ladder below the house we descend to silence as well. Obvious hints (and less obvious ones) will manifest themselves as letters in the mailbox.
Since, Klaymen awakes newly born, without any knowledge of himself or his world, he (and the player) must rely on the mysterious Willie Trombone. Willie communicates to Klaymen through hints in those letters in the mailbox. (so sometimes if you’re stuck you need to trek back home to get your hint) Willie also stars in the 20 video discs scattered throughout the game world. Klaymen will need to collect those video discs and take them to consoles scattered around TNH to play back. The videos show Willie in a manner not unlike animated line drawings in clay as he tells story of TNH. Though the player may watch them as they are collected, he’ll need to watch them again all the way through to collect a crucial game item.
The first letter from Willie is a rather clear hint…
“Dear Klaymen,
Please feed my pet flytrap.
He eats ring food.
I do not.
Love, Willie.”
After reading any letter, the tidy Klaymen will deposit it in the waste bin.
Others letters are less clear, such as…
“Dear Klaymen,
You may have already won two bricks of Klay!!!
Love, Willie”
This one refers to the video discs you must collect throughout the game, or perhaps not
Some are not useful at all…
“Dear Klaymen,
Send this letter to three friends or you will fall ill.
Willie Dewan”
At a later point in the game, Klaymen’s nemesis, the Evil Klog will begin to send him letters as well.
Heading back up the ladder to the house, you can have Klaymen take advantage of the first hint by shoving the plant under the fourth ring. When the ring is pulled down within range, the flytrap will jump up and swallow it, holding the door open for Klaymen to leave.
When Klaymen leaves the house the camera POV shifts and we can look 360 around the environment. The music has stopped and we hear the wind and some spooky environmental sound effects as we pan around the immediate area. It’s a courtyard-like space and across it, and a little to the left from the house where Klaymen was sleeping is the Hall of Records. Entering the Hall kicks us back into third-person perspective. A new musical piece with a deep-voiced singer belting out unintelligible lyrics plays while a large overhead fan squeaks its blades in circles. On the wall is a slider puzzle with a rune-like character displayed in a jumble. Next to the puzzle is the doorway and there’s something on the floor in front of Klaymen. Clicking on that item on the floor (our first video disc) will get Klaymen to walk over to it and pick it up. Once he’s got it he’ll press one of the balls on his chest, open a hatch door in his torso and pop the item inside. Arranging the sliders in the right sequence to unscramble the rune opens the door.
The next room has a console-like device against the wall, another video disc on the floor and a solid wall with a mouse hole across from the door Klaymen has just walked through. Click on the console and Klaymen will retrieve as many disks from his chest as he’s currently holding and insert them into the player. They’ll appear under the screen in the order they’re meant to play in. These first two are numbers one and two, but as you collect them through the game they won’t always be in sequence like these are. There will also be other consoles along the way and any of them can take any of the disks and you can view all of them from any device.
“Um...
Hello!
Me Willie.
Me Willie Trombone!
These disks tell a story. Story about good. Story about bad.
These disks are all that are left of the TRUE story...
True story of the closing of the third age.
Willie know that once you know this truth, then you know what to do.
This, I tell you.”
At this point, about 15 minutes into gameplay depending on how quickly you’ve solved the first puzzles and headed to the House of Records, you’ve pretty much learned to do most of what needs to be done, without any dry, formulaic training, cuz its just that simple to navigate and interact in TNH. You’re also likely well-hooked, as I was, though the fun was just beginning. Nor was I alone. Jeffery Adam Young, from PC World, in an interview that was part of the Video Press Kit from Dreamworks said,
“I put the disk in thinking, oh this is kinda cute, and the intro was good enough. I started playing it and it seemed quirky at first and… uh, I didn’t put it down. I played it eight and a half hours* straight. (laughs) I played the entire game in one setting.”
Quirky it is. At one point Klaymen will enter a room where the puzzle is solved by building a Klaymen-like effigy made out of Dynamite. And outside of this room is another courtyard, open and with a large-sized, mushroom-shaped, berry bush. Click on the bush and Klaymen will pop a berry into his mouth and chew it with greatly exaggerated facial expressions, swallow it and burp. Second berry, bigger burp. Third berry, a burp that goes on for roughly 2-3 minutes.
Touring around the space will lead Klaymen to a vaguely crab-shaped icon on the wall that reveals some monstrous activity when clicked. More exploration will reveal a jack-in-the-box style music box that plays most of “Pop Goes the Weasel” and then stops just before the final punch-line of the song. There’s a brief pause, the sound of large feet charging forward, a basso “Pop Goes The Weasel” staff line plays and a giant green crab-like “Weasel” burst through the wall to chase the Klaymen around the belch-berry bush. A quick application of the dynamite Klaymen effigy saves the day.
Like a silent film comedian, Klaymen’s facial expressions, body language and physical movements make him an engaging protagonist. He projects the same kind of innocence and naïveté that a Chaplin or Keaton would to connect to their audience. That the game works as well as it does speaks to the skill of the animation team that brought him and his companions to life. As with a classic silent movie, sight gags, slapstick and pratfalls abound.
As the player progresses through the game, other adventure game staples make their appearance. Teleport booths to get Klaymen from place-to-place, item collection and inventory are at the heart of the game, but the inventory is manageable and items from it apply themselves appropriately, without the player having to puzzle them out. And like the old text adventures, pencil and paper are required. Several puzzles will require code breaking using runes and glyphs so you’ll need to write them down, along with the,sequence they appear in. In other places you’ll come across vials of liquid filled to various levels, or need to listen to, and replicate, sound sequences. Noting these down for future reference can be helpful as well
Other, less traditional challenges and techniques in the game involve Klaymen shrinking and growing like Alice in Wonderland, blowing a hole in a lake with a Howitzer to drain it and motivating a giant, teddy bear loving robot to do his bidding, just to name a few.
The story that eventually emerges from the discs has a familiar, biblical ring to it. Hoborg, a being of infinite power and creativity, creates TNH and begins to populate it. Finding it lonely, he decides to create a being that is almost his equal, Klog. But Klog covets Hoborg’s crown and the creative powers that it instills in the wearer. He steals it, putting Hoborg in a mystical coma. If TNH is to be saved, Klaymen must revive Hoborg and defy Klog. But will he? You’ll have to play it through (or watch the youtube walk through video clips) to find out.
TNH and Klaymen, post-release
Though the game was a critical success, it wasn’t a financial one, selling 41-42K copies according to several industry sales sources. TNH was released in Japan as “Klaymen Klaymen,” and the Japanese market responded well enough to spawn some sequels. The first, “Skullmonkeys,” a kind-of sequel platformer that takes Klog and Klaymen to another world, was released in 1998 for Sony’s PlayStation. It did less well in the states than TNH did, but also fared well in Japan, where it, received the appropriate name “Klaymen Klaymen 2.” A Japanese only PlayStation game set in The Neverhood universe called “Klaymen Gun-Hockey” came after that. It did have some of the TNH characters but wasn’t a claymation game, nor was it developed by the TNH team; instead, it was developed by the Japanese game company Riverhill. The Neverhood, Inc. company, went on to develop the PlayStation game Boombots, and Klaymen appeared in it as a secret fighter. After Boombots, The Neverhood, Inc. closed up shop.
And yet, TNH and Klaymen just won’t go quietly into the good night. In 2007, media company Frederator, inc. (best known for the cartoon shows Fairly Odd Parents and Adventure Time) announced Federator Films in 2007 with a slate of films (as yet unproduced) with TNH being one of them. Little more has been heard since (about TNH) but Frederator Films announced their first film in production in 2009, a feature length Samurai Jack production, with hints about more to come. IMDB lists the TNH film as in production with a 2011 release.
Type “The Neverhood” into YouTube and one of the first videos to come up is a Spore creature version of Klaymen. A fan game , “Klaymen” was produced in 2008. The soundtrack CD is still available new for $20, and the copies of TNH can be found on eBay for $40-$100 depending on condition. Recently TNH was selected by “Microsoft at Home” as one of “5 Cool Underrated Games.”
In a landscape full of bloated, bloody action games, copy-cat titles and “financially safe” innovation-challenged game-of-the-movie titles, it’s worthy to look back at games like TNH that dared to be different. I hope that Frederator Films does get a TNH movie out the door and Klaymen, Willie, Hoborg and the rest of the crew will be awakened from their slumber with a new crown on their collective heads.
* While today’s hard core gamers often throw a shoe when confronted with games that have less than 30-40 hours of gameplay, in the case of this game one has to remember that it often takes 2-3 years to create 90 minutes of stop motion film. TNH’s 50,000 frames calculates out at about an hour of stop-motion animation utilized in the game.
List of links and resources for The Neverhood
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Neverhood (General Overview)
http://www.microsoft.com/athome/students/5coolgames.aspx (recent plug)
http://www.neverhood.se/olde/nev/index.html (Archived site for the game)
http://doo.nomoretangerines.com/nevhood/allabout.htm (Collected Mail, Hall of Records,
maps, etc)
http://tennapel.com/ Home on the web of TNH’s gifted creative lead
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lt9Kldsjxtc&feature=fvw (Spore Klaymen)
http://klaymengame.blogspot.com/ (Fan Game, not played by this author so do so at your
own risk)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1nMoiNw42s&feature=related (“Making of” video from the game, part #1)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXHeCQb7lx0&feature=related (“Making of” video from the game, part #1)
http://www.archive.org/details/dreamworks_neverhood_1996 (Dreamworks’ video press kit for the release)
http://www.danielamos.com/store/index.html (On-line store for the Soundtrack)
http://shop.ebay.com/i.html?_trkparms=65%253A12%257C66%253A2%257C39%253A... (eBay link for TNH search)