A playthrough of Riverhillsoft's 1998 point-and-click adventure game for the Sony PlayStation, Klaymen Klaymen: Neverhood no Nazo (クレイマン・クレイマン ～ネバーフッドの謎～).
Klaymen Klaymen is a PlayStation port of The Neverhood (PC, Windows 95), a game developed by The Neverhood, produced by DreamWorks Interactive and published by Microsoft in 1996. The PS1 version of the game was a Japanese-exclusive release, but thanks to an enterprising fan, the entire game has been patched to play in English. The in-game text has been translated and the Japanese audio has been replaced with assets pulled from the original English PC release.
If you are interested in trying it out for yourself, let me refer you to a video by YouTube user Skwoz: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTdmxkJky48
He has posted a link to a translated version of the game in PSP eboot format. You can extract a bin/cue image from the eboot with PSX2PSP, and that will allow you to play it on a PS1 emulator or to burn it to a CD-R for play on a modified console.
It has been a very long time since I last played The Neverhood (or its PS1 exclusive sequel Skullmonkeys for that matter!), but even though it's been about twenty years, everything immediately came flooding back. Does anyone else remember their first time playing this on a first-generation Pentium? Those graphics! Just imagine how many manhours went into making this! Everything was created using hand-sculpted models and stop-motion animation, and that wasn’t just for the characters, either. The transitions clips, the environments, objects were all created from clay. It looked absolutely stunning, and it was just as much a work of art as it was a game. It still holds up incredibly well today.
The game puts you in control of the literally named Klaymen. He wakes up in a daze and finds himself quite nearly alone in this bizarre, abstract, but thoroughly beautiful world, and for most of the game, your primary goal is to find the video disks that ultimately reveal the purpose and importance of your quest. The controls are easy - it supports the PSX Mouse (nice touch!) and analog pointer controls, and both work well. The puzzles range from insanely easy to "are you actually serious right now?", but a simple press of the square button will usually give you a tip to nudge you in the right direction.
The PlayStation port is solid, but it makes the concessions that you'd expect. The resolution has been halved from the original’s 640x480, but even with such a loss in detail the graphics shine. The first-person movement FMV clips are better looking on the PS1 thanks to its hardware MPEG video decoder. They look less compressed, run more smoothly, and run at a higher color depth than their PC equivalents. It's a good upgrade! The sound is lower quality than it was on PC but it still sounds just fine, though I do wish that the music didn’t restart every time the screen changes. I'd guess that was a consequence of the PS1's limited RAM, as is the port's most glaring issue: the loading times frequently interrupt the flow of the game. They're not super long, but the PC game’s transitions were nearly seamless, so you'll certainly feel the difference.
The port is also missing the Hall of Records section. It was a cool inclusion in the PC game, but walking across 30 screens with 5-10 seconds of loading between each on the PS1 would've been insufferable. It’s probably for the best that they left it out. But did they really have to cut the epic belch? When it comes to gameplay, puzzles aren't the title’s strong suit. They often feel like they’ve been included merely to give you something to do, and while some of them make perfect sense in context, others (slider puzzles, match-the-color/sound puzzles, dial turning puzzles) rehash the types that I’ve always hated in games like Myst. Still, the game is quite short and fairly easy, so they don't detract too much from the experience.
The real focus of the game is its world and its atmosphere, anyway. Even back in the 90s, reviewers conceded that the puzzles were lacking, but that didn't stop them from heaping rave reviews on The Neverhood, and it deserved every last word of praise it received.
Klaymen himself is a surprisingly charismatic character, and he and his world are clearly a labor of love on the part of their creators, many of whom (if you couldn't tell from the style) previously worked on the Earthworm Jim games. It’s an awesome work that today serves as a potent reminder of just how excellent games can be when the integrity of the developers’ artistic vision and their commitment to quality are respected and given priority over corporate profit margins and DLC potential.
*Bad ending added after credit roll!
_
No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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