Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders
Zak McKracken is a tabloid reporter (and not a very good one at that). After having a psychedelic dream one day, Zak realizes that something is wrong -- space aliens are dumbifying the general public through the telephone system. Zak must stop this, but he can't do it alone. After finding a strange crystal, Zak manages to get the help of the anthropologist Annie and her friends, Melissa and Leslie. The four unlikely heroes must now figure out a way to destroy the dumbifying devices and save the Earth. Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders is a third-person puzzle-solving adventure similar in gameplay to Lucasfilm's breakthrough title Maniac Mansion. The player chooses verb commands (Open, Pick Up, Give, etc.; there are no Look or Talk commands) to interact with the game world. The game features up to four controllable protagonists; it is possible to switch between them at any time after they have been introduced, and also exchange inventory items if the characters are in the same location. The game can be described as a "globe-trotting" adventure, since the heroes are required to travel to different exotic countries and even leave the Earth for a while in order to complete it. Some of the puzzles are optional or can be solved in different ways. The FM Towns version has VGA graphics with 256 colors and higher-quality music and sound effects.
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Zak is probably one of the hardest games from LucasArts catalog of point & click adventure games. Most games after Zak & Maniac Mansion the company (for the most part) removed the possibility of dying or ending up in an unwinnable situation. Which was a change for the better. Zak happened just before this change, unfortunately.
That you can die is not a big problem though. Zak's biggest weakness is that you have limited money, and for quite a while no way of getting more money, but you need to travel by plane around the world to visit various obligatory places. You run empty pretty quickly as planes are expensive.
You also have to mid-land in some countries to get to others.
So it's easy to just run out of money and end up stuck in a country. You have to restart, or load a game.
So you have to note down routes to not go broke, and probably save/load to explore places one by one so you can LATER do them over again in an order your budget allows. It's a strange hassle, and one I think I heard David Fox said in an interview he regretted.
There's also quite a few large labyrinths, where you are pretty much forced to draw down on paper. That is okay, but I wouldn't hold it against anyone if they found a map online.
Beyond some of these drawback I think the game is a classic. The universe, the characters, the humor, and many of the puzzles are fun and inventive. I especially liked the 2001-themed section on the moon.
I never got very far when I played this when I was younger, and this was quite hard, but I'm happy to say I eventually got through it.
Recommended if you love point-and-clicks and LucasArts adventures. Otherwise you may find it boring and frustrating.