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.