[Antrax]

Games don't annoy people; People annoy people.

INT. MICROSOFT BUILDING
Employee: ...and this is how I managed to get Office to recognise which documents are the most important, and crash just before the user would save for the first time.
(polite applause)
Courier: (bursts through the door panting) Bi...Bill Gates is coming!
Everybody scramble to their feet, trying to look their best. Bill Gates enters.
Bill Gates:Hello everyone. I'm very rich. Also, I'd like you to know that we're branching out.
Employee:Automobiles?
Employee #2:Cancer research?
Bill Gates: You're a dedicated bunch. Here's some money. In any case, we're going to focus on the market of mice in the very near future.
Employee: That's sheer briiliance! Pest control is a very fast grow-
Bill Gates: COMPUTER mice, you dolt. Anyway, we need some ideas on how to infiltrate the market.
Employee:Maybe we could build mice with a lot of crappy features nobody needs. Like a "back" button for browsers and a lot of hard-to-reach buttons "for gamers".
Bill Gates:Terrible idea. Nobody's THAT stupid.
Employee #2:Well, I think if we could get people to click their mice a lot more, we'll increase wear, and they'll HAVE to buy a new mouse a lot more frequently.
Bill Gates:Intriguing. And how do you suppose we do that?
Employee: Let's write a new game, something simple and free. Like, you'd have to toss a penguin across all sorts of terrain, and the computer will tell you how far you flung it.
Bill Gates:Nobody would want to play something that idiotic. Plus, you said the F-word. You're fired.
Employee #2: Well, how about if we... (mumbles)
Bill Gates listens intently, an evil smile creeping on his face. Lightning lights his hideous features. A distant thunder can be heard.

It all started a week ago. A friend of mine called me. "Check out what I found. It's a puzzle-based game from Microsoft".
"Oh my God. You're going to try and dupe me into playing Pandora's Box again, aren't you?"
"No no no. It's something called 'The Neverhood'."
"Never heard of it."
"Well, it's really cool, has very unique graphics, you should try it."
"Okay. But if it's Pandora's Box, there's going to be hell to pay".
We met, CDs were exchanged, and I set out to finally get the Carpal Tunnel Syndrom I was way overdue for.
The first thought I had when I launched the game was "cool". The graphics really were unique, and the animation amusing. It opened up with two simple puzzles in succession, after which I had turned blind.
Or at least, I thought I had. The nicely sharp graphics suddenly mutated into something that looked like an overly compressed JPG of a modern painting. After I got over the shock of such a contrast between the graphics, I set out to explore the wacky world of The Neverhood. After a couple of clicks that displayed how extremely narrow your viewpoint of the world is in "first person mode" (compare with Under a Killing Moon), I stumbled into the Hall of Records, where I finally realised the true purpose of The Neverhood.
The Hall of Recrods is guarded by an extremely simple and unoriginal puzzle. This is because the authors of the game WANT you to go in there, and experience the horror firsthand. You see, the Hall of Records is a place where the history of the world is written on the walls. Sounds nice, right? Except this "history" is extremely, EXTREMELY lengthy and idiotic, and for some inexplicable reason, you have to click on each column of text in turn to read it. That means that to read the first retarded (albeit amusing) story about fojolukranest or whatever that deity's name was, you have to go to five difference screens, and click on four columns of text in each, plus a click to go back to normal view - a total of 40 clicks just to read the first story. After I saw the story contained nothing of relevance, I just started roaming the hall of records to the right, to see how much reading I was in for. After 3 minutes of real time had passed, I was STILL trying to see where it ends. At first I thought it's a sort of loop, but no, every room has more text, and Klaymen staggers slowly through them one by one, with no way to speed up his walking speed. Think of Myst, only without the little lightning icon.
At this point I alt-tabbed out of the game, and loaded up gamefaqs, to see if there's a point to the Hall of Records. Much like I thought, the stories were completely irrelevant. "But why would they want to write so much crap and take forever to walk through the rooms?" I innocently thought, a question I was only going to figure out after two days of real time. In any case, I finished going through all the screens to find an object you have to pick up to beat the game, then limped SLOWLY back to the beginning of the Hall of Record, muttering under my breath the whole time. Frustrated with such an oversight by the game's designers, I set out to explore the world some more. My next encounter was with the "claw". For those of you who are unfamiliar with the game, a part of it is to navigate a strange vehicle on tracks carved into a mountain side. "This is a cool idea" I thought, and went one screen down. There, I saw the spiral. It was not a maze, since you could see all of it, and there were no junctions. However, the game has no pathfinding, so to navigate to the center you had to click repeatedly on the next part of the spiral, again a total of about 20 clicks in and a similar number for out, as you guide the annoyingly slow Klaymen through something that could've just been a straight line without losing any of the challenge. At this point, I became suspicious.

Fast forward a bit. I solved some more unoriginal or just obvious puzzles, and now was faced with a situation I couldn't figure out. After a day I loaded up gamefaqs again, to find out the solution is something I did in the first room in the game. So I had to hike slowly all the way over the gameworld, do something simple, then crawl all the way back. This repeated itself several times - puzzles the solution to which was either written on some wall in the beginning of the game, or involves some lever from the beginning of the game, forcing you to slowly navigate the entire world, over and over again. The puzzles themselves required patience a lot more than intelligence or creative thinking, such as the "lengthy and annoying memory game puzzle" and some others I will not elaborate on, to avoid spoiling the game to the poor souls who'd want to try it even after reading this review.
Another annoying point is the fact whoever made the game was simply in love with his brilliant idea for graphics, meaning he never lets you skip movies. This means at some point in the game you have to sit and watch Klaymen burping for two minutes (nothing like toilet humour), not to mention having to watch him fall down stairs about 4-5 times. This also served to lengthen the game artificially, and after the second day of playing, I knew why - the game is short. Really short. Solve-about-10-puzzles-and-win short. If they didn't force you to constantly go back dozens of screens (slowly, might I add), anyone could probably beat this game in about a day (because the puzzles really are easy).
Don't get me wrong, there are things I liked about the game. The humour is amusing for most part (especially the animations) and the graphics, when not in "first person" mode are pretty sharp and very original. This only served to show that had they not completely disregarded the player, the game could've been great. All it takes is to just:
A) Mark hotspots, or at least have names pop over things when you click them. It's REALLY annoying picking something up and not knowing what it is.
B) Allow you to skip movies.
C) Give you a clickable map to take you from location to location.
D) Make up some puzzles on their own.

Overall, this game has a lot of potential, and I would definitely play a sequel if it came out, assuming they'd work out those kinks. I give it a 3/5, because I think it would be great for little children, who don't mind repetition as much, and who would probably find the puzzles challenging.