A very simplistic and short point-n-click adventure/puzzle game, but filled to the brim with charm, a great atmosphere, lovable and goofy characters by Doug TenNapel, clever puzzles and an extremely unique artstyle made completely out of 3 tons of clay. And what about the stupidly amazing soundtrack?? Definetly one of my favourites in gaming ever!

One of the most unique, joyful and memorable experiences I've ever had with videogames in my life. Totally recommended, especially as a first entry for newcomers to point n click adventures!

i never finished it, but i got incredibly close. this game has a lot to love, but god, there's so much dated annoying game design in here and there's just too much walking around. if somebody made a version of this game where klaymen walked at least a little faster and there were less shitty broken puzzles then this would earn its place as a classic imo. i love the claymation, atmosphere, humor, and overall visual design of course, but the music... holy shit the music. one of my favorite osts for any game hands down. there's a lot of broken shit in here, but there's enough good here for me to give it a 7. hopefully i can beat it one day!

Witnessing once great and important things become abandoned can be sad. This game was a mystical relic of the 90s, a puzzlebox of secrets, which showed you amazing claymation when the puzzles were solved. Now it's abandonware and its gamedesign is outdated, while all the cutscene-cartoons are up on Youtube, which means only a few will be keen to dig up this old junk.
When your game is centered around an animation gimmick, point-and-click adventure is the perfect genre for it. The world of the game is a product of a year of labor, meticulous plasticine craftsmanship and animation, and the player will be carefully observing and clicking it all while searching for the next key to progress. The quirky and psychedelic aesthetic makes it easy to lose yourself in this world, creating an unforgettable trip. The spotless black void in which the Neverhood is suspended, the weird Biblical/Silmarillion overtones in the story are juxtaposed against crass humor and slapstick, creating a mixture of fear and fun, similar to what Pendleton Ward described when talking about Adventure Time.
The puzzles will stand in the way of that though. Some of them are standart - sliding tiles, match two etc. Others require more abstract thought or keyhunting. At best they are cute or interesting. At worst they are aggravating, or not even puzzles at all, just progress blockers, like how you have to turn on the radio. To make matters worse, Klaymen, the main character, walks really slowly, backtracking is required, and that often means reiplementing puzzle solutions on top of that. All of this, as you might imagine, can be quite aggravating.
If you have special emotions associated with old MTV or Cartoon Network, or punky 90's pop culture in general, this is definitely worth your time.

There's something about adventure games like this that are timeless. It isn't the structure, the puzzles, or the "use everything in your inventory on one object" type of guesswork that they inevitably dabble in from time to time. Playing a game like Myst when it was released was probably a revelation for the technology it helped push into the limelight, but looked at through modern technology, it's a game built entirely around quiet time. There's never a moment where something leaps out at you; at most, you're given cryptic messages that only add to the eerie feeling of being watched the entire time. It's entirely unlike a game that would be made today and shows an ocean of differences between how games were designed then and now. Games like Myst are still being made, mainly because Cyan keeps releasing and remaking their darling and has probably done so at the rate that Bethesda has rereleased Skyrim. But clearly, there's still a market for it if barely anyone raises their voice about it.

What makes The Neverhood timeless isn't this same quiet and yet silently otherworldly approach to exploration, but the fact that it never, for a moment, cares about making sense. The Neverhood is a bible cartoon by way of Ren and Stimpy. It's loud, brash, and stupid, and doesn't care if that isn't your thing. On earth, the main theme songs to some of your favorite television shows and movies are melodic and moving. In The Neverhood's barren world, it's one guy making indecipherable sounds with his mouth, and somehow it still slaps. Every bit of oddball charm works perfectly with the claymated style the developers went with, and the game has this aurora of charm to it because of that that never gets old.

If you want to replay this without setting up a virtual machine or pulling out your old computer, ScummVM is the best way to do it. There's a built-in save state system (which I didn't know about until recently), and the game is pretty much a plug-and-play affair, granted you have the right files. I made a video about it ages ago, and because I'm a bit shameless when it comes to self-advertising sometimes, I'll leave the link to it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zSAgWonTTU

Nevermore... nevermore...

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The Neverhood is such a hard experience to describe. It lacks focus, its puzzles are some of the worst I've ever dealt with and its story is borderline nonexistent until the very end and yet, it's one of my favorite games of all time. Exploring this vast empty world made out of clay is incredibly engaging. The music is unlike any other soundtrack I've heard for pretty much anything. The stop motion is amateurish yet very charming and endearing. It's a bit hard to pin down what specifically makes me love this game so much but, I just can't help it man. I would love to see a remaster someday with cleaner scans of the original game's assets.

My memories of this game are soupy, old and hard to recall. I remember the blank disc with The Neverhood written badly on it in permenant marker, I remember my older sister letting me sit on the desk next to the family pc so I could see her play. I remember the music and the sound effects, the cutscenes and vagjely the story. I remember my dad joking around and quoting one of the characters because I found it funny, and I remember remembering it again a long long time after and hunting down clips of it on youtube to see if it had all been real.
This game feels like childhood more than any other, despite it not being one that I really played much myself at all. I feel so fondly for it, but I couldn't really tell you why.
As an animator now in my adulthood, I have an even bigger fondness for the stopmotion however.

I'm willing to tentatively call this one an essential experience. Portraying a claymation world from a first-person perspective using 90s FMV creates such a strikingly lonely atmosphere that it's hard to say the combination is anything less than genius. The simple event of coming across a character who actually speaks out loud in the Neverhood is legitimately jarring in a way that few, if any, games are able to really capture. But that's not all: perhaps the game's most infamous feature outside of its presentation is the (both figuratively and literally) biblical lore dump that you can access right out of the gate. It takes about as much time to read this actual wall of text as it does to play through the rest of the game, and it's not like the game's story makes more sense if you've read it or anything. To finish the game you at least need to have walked down the hallway that contains this background info, which is a time consuming effort in itself, but it also serves another purpose. The game puts so much emphasis on asking the player to question what's really relevant. There's plenty of objects in the world that you can interact with but don't actually do anything, save for maybe setting up a joke. It goes both ways, too. Without spoiling anything, there's one really egregious example where one puzzle doesn't activate unless you've tried a particular incorrect solution for an earlier puzzle. The initial lore dump does a great job at setting this up. To some, it's an integral part of the Neverhood, indicative of its wildly distinct tone and important to the events of the story. To others, it's a joke at the expense of the player that the devs put in just because they could. It's a worthwhile inclusion for sure, but the gameplay that it represents certainly isn't perfect. It's, at the very least, an interesting puzzle philosophy, and you could make an argument that it's necessary considering the absence of a standard point-and-click 'use item' feature severely limits the puzzle design options, but it falls apart as the game progresses. Soon after the feelings that the Neverhood evokes set in, all the game really asks you to do is to have a pen and paper ready and be willing to write stuff down. To me, this isn't really all that valuable for an adventure game that takes place in a world that's otherwise endlessly intriguing. It's not like anything else, and that's more than worth the price of admission, but I can't see myself ever feeling the need to come back.

The Neverhood is a game I played as a child, possibly one of the first games I ever played. I think my dad had a demo disk which cut off after a while, and I played that section over and over until the full game came out, at which point it took both of us way too long to solve all the puzzles in a world where internet guides were far less comprehensive. The claymation animation is gorgeous, the puzzles are mixed but generally solid and unique enough to keep you engaged, and despite being a relatively simple bible story written by a notorious bigot, there are literally no women in it so the game ends in a gay paradise where only himbos exist.
It has aged somewhat, most notably in said notorious bigot creator, but I honestly still love this game and I'm glad that SkummVM means it and many other games are still playable on modern PCs.
Also it's still significantly better than it's spiritual successor, Armikrog. Armikrog is very bad.

It's been said that "quantity is a quality all it's own", and I'd like to invoke that sentiment to suggest that Weirdness and personality can be a substitute for substance, which I think is true in varying degrees depending on the material. This substitution is well above ersatz in The Neverhood; it has a style and a presentation which is instantly forever memorable and that deserves respect. On the other hand, I don't actually like playing it very much, and I don't think peculiarity can entirely replace any fledging semblance of a conventional narrative or structure. Still worth playing though.