The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

So, you’ve played Ben There, Dan That! You’ve both Ben there and Danned that. So what do you do?

Well, you give a nice indie developer 5 bucks and move on and play Time Gentlemen, Please!

The description on their website there is pretty well completely accurate. Time Gentlemen, Please! is bigger, better programmed with better interface stuff, funnier, and just all around a better game. Not that this makes Ben There, Dan That! any less fun. It’s just clear that, once they realized they had a hit on their hands, they came back and made a much better game in the same world, letting the in-game versions of themselves start to deviate nicely from who they were and become their own characters, and giving the game all the bells and whistles one expects from an adventure game in this day and age. Like, say, nice background music most of the time. Still no voices, though, but once again, the writing does make up for it. Completely.

The plot involves significantly less alternate dimensions than the first game, though keeping things just as wacky: in an attempt to stop coathangers from existing, they’ve managed to get stuck in WWII, where they’ve accidentally given Hitler an army of cloned dinosaurs and a large mecha suit. Maybe that doesn’t mean much, but it actually does mean quite a bit for the flow of the game. Ben There, Dan That! was very much a big collection of silly ideas thrown together with the “alternate dimension” mechanic as an easy explanation to paste it all together. (Again, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t entertaining, just, you know, it was obvious what they were doing.) In this game, Zombie Cow has obviously planned out what’s going on, making a very unified world that feels like a complete space, even in it’s complete and utter weirdness and humor.
There’s a plot, there’s character arcs, everything happens so much better. The puzzle-y bits, too, are more involved and more difficult, if you’re into that sort of thing, but they also seem to have built in much more hints into the dialog to counteract this, so the overall difficulty isn’t too bad.
It’s just a great little adventure game that’s worth your time, and the really cheap price of admission.

Luckily, this seems to have done well for them, which is excitement! They announced that they have another sequel coming, this in a more strongly episodic format, they say. I’m all for more episodic adventure games, and I’m sure I’ll toss them a few bucks when this new endeavor comes out, though I hope it gets on Steam quicker than the originals did. I kinda like Steam a lot. It’s why I waited so long to try Ben There, Dan That, even when I had heard buzz about it before. Then, suddenly, it was on Steam, and there you go. I’m weird.

But yeah, no, I am of the much enjoying this game. Yes.