Time Gentlemen, Please! and Ben There, Dan That! Special Edition Double Pack

steam thinks i played these for almost 72 hours for some reason.

10/10

Good ol' fashioned and enjoyable point and clicker. Recommended!

Witty dialogue that reminds of Lucasarts highlights. One measure of quality in point and click adventure games is how often I have to look up on the internet for a solution and I only had to do it once without the puzzles being too easy.

Aggressively unfunny and with an atrocious interface. Why you have to cycle through every interaction option by right clicking instead of just throwing the verbs up on screen is beyond me. Regardless, considering that the trend for modern adventure games is to effectively give you makework instead of actual puzzles you're not exactly spoiled for choice. Depending on your tolerance it could be worth playing just for the puzzles. I don't think I can recommend this but I also can't NOT recommend it. Take that for what you will.

Together, these two games make up an unmissable, absurdist epic targeted at diehard point 'n' clickers. Leave your common sense and political correctness at the door, boys -- it's time to grab your adventure bro (literal or figurative) and gear your brains into Little Nemo in Slumberland mode. There are coarse British jokes about man-sap, bloody feces, and footballers. There are puzzles involving randy mice and used condoms. There are snappy responses for virtually any item combination. Hitler plays a major role in the second game, but the surreal setting and back-alley humor somehow make it much less eye-rolling. That one puzzle involving cat abuse is purely unacceptable -- it did wilt my enthusiasm a bit -- but the grandly stupid finale almost made me forget about it.

The Ben & Dan adventure duology is one of the real classics!

As much an essay on adventure gaming as an adventure game in its own right. Seamlessly switches between narrative layers in a manner that not only breaks the fourth wall, but never actually instates it, it's like it's never there, like playing the game and listening to dev's commentaries in the same coherent narration, without ever switching between them. I can think of no other game that does that so naturally.

Furthermore, never since Discworld have I played a game so quintessential to the genre! It will take you roughly 10 hours to play it (maybe 15 if you're actively seeking out every line of dialogue, even the ones written for the more obscure item interactions), but, by the time you finish it, you'll feel you've become familiar with an entire breed of games it belongs to. Again, I can think of no other game that does that so convincingly.

If you loved the old LucasArts adventure games and desperately earn for more, then you probably definitely should play these 2 games as well. The developers seem to understand the adventure genre very well, cleverly referencing and playing with the genre tropes in both games. The humor is outrageously good (at least to my taste) and the attention to detail is astounding. I was honestly impressed with how many of the "use item on thing" interactions have unique (and funny) responses written for them and not just the usual "That doesn't work!" The puzzles are well-explained and enjoyable, sometimes playing with the media itself, making you think outside the box, breaking the 4th wall and all that. If you get stuck, you can usually exmine or try to combine some stuff you haven't tried before and that would provide additional clues, which is really good design imo.

All in all, great games, great fun, go play them.

As funny and insane as the first one, although I must admit certain puzzles were frustrating. Definitely a fun time for point and click fans. There is a soft kill in the game that will force you to restart so be sure to get the magnet from the fridge.

A pair of short point and click adventure games that pay homage to the genre and games from the old days.

Each game is exceptionally short and linier, with simple puzzles interjected with entertaining banter between the protagonists.

Pros:
The games are bitesize, being simple enough to be fast paced really supports this.
The stories are somewhat entertaining, with enough premise to drive the game forward.
The games are well executed, mining the nostalgia successfully.

Cons:
Everything about these games is dated, and I don’t know how well they would translate to a younger audience. Having played through the old point and click adventures, in the old days, will improve the game somewhat thanks to the power of nostalgia.
Linked to this, the humour is on point for the time. But I’m not sure how funny some of the jokes would be to non-brits, non-older nerds, people who ‘weren’t there’, and non-point and click vets.
My final con is that the game, being a point and click adventure in the style of the old point and click adventure games, suffers from all of the problems of the genre; pixel hunting, rubbing everything on everything else, item combinations that should work on puzzles in theory don’t because there is only one solution. (Though the short adventures make this less of an issue.)

Suggested improvements:
Other than remastering to ease the eye, the only thing I feel would improve these games with minimal effort would be if they were voice acted.
More music and sound effects wouldn’t be amiss either.

Overall recommendation:
If you’re a Brit that played the early point and click adventures, Lucas arts, sierra, or revolutions, and have a soft spot for them, then these games will probably make you smile.

Short, small screens, and buggy all around with a few references to Lucas games from back-in-the-day to give it validation and on par with those games. Deary me, no...,

I like the simple art style. Just wish the scenes were larger so I could find my way around easier..

Point & click adventures are my second favorite type of game. Too bad the above complaints left me feeling "meh" most of the time and frustrated to the point of hair-pulling the rest.

Steam...please, please, paaa-lease give us a "Mixed" recommend option so we can clarify our likes/dislikes more directly. Seems much fairer to the devs overall, as well.

[quote]Ben There, Dan That and Time Gentleman, Please! Are adventures in the classic point and click mould. That being said they are thick with humour, sometimes lewd, and anyone unprepared for a bit of British “banter” is in for a rude awakening. The puzzles are generally good, although comparable to some of the more confusing 90’s offerings at times, and if you can tolerate the graphics and repetitive sound, and would like something a little different, these two games are unlikely to disappoint.[/quote]

Humour is something that can be difficult to get right…we all have a sense of it, though more often than not it merely tingles rather than erupts. And that’s obviously because different people find different things funny, and so going pedal to the metal towards a comedy point and click adventure is rolling the dice. And to be completely honest with you, I almost abandoned these two games because of all the funnies…and this coming from a Brit with an understanding of the injokes and fourth wall breaking references.

Ben There, Dan That and Time Gentleman, Please! are peas in a pod, the former effectively serving as a more basic demo of the latter, setting the stage for Ben and Dan’s real adventure. They echo the old school style of point and click from the 90’s (Lucasarts not Sierra) rather than the more modern take we see today from the likes of Wadjet Eye. In practice this means at times the puzzles stray away from the more logical solutions that are more common in later games. In fairness this isn’t really a problem in BTDT, and only becomes particularly frustrating and skewed near the last section of TGP where, for me at least, I was pulling my hair out trying to work out what I should be doing. However, it’s the clever puzzle design that kept me playing. Hat’s off to Size Five Games here, because by the time I’d become sick of the comic interplay between the characters it was the strength of the puzzling that kept me going.

Both games use an unusual interface where the left mouse is the tried and test action or walk button, whilst the right rotates a mini menu between options that activate with left click (walk, talk, examine, item use or Dan use). It took me a while to get used to, but it works well enough with the more standard inventory system in which your items get stashed. And a stash is indeed what you will accrue in TGP, as the game has a habit of not tying up puzzles or items, leaving a multitude of options and potential confusion. This isn’t helped by the common problem of being left in the dark about what to do or where to go next. Both games have an overarching plot but at times don’t really break this down so well into objectives, leaving a player a little reliant on eureka moments.

It’s that tortuous puzzle structure that at times can feel like a little too much of a throwback, and admittedly made me reach for a guide once or twice. They’re generally fun little brain teasers that make sense, but certainly those coming from more modern games are likely to feel frustrated at times, and whilst Dan does offer advice on occasion, a more formalised hint system would have been nice. Again, these problems tend to be limited to the later parts of the second game, and at that point the humour will likely have worn you down, so it’s not an egregious problem and it left me more disappointed with myself but not recalling my old moon logic skills.

The graphics are definitely going to be a barrier to some people, in that they're most definitely a retro project. However, they’re both nice looking, stylised games with a unified aesthetic and generally once past that initial bump won’t be a problem at all, with TGP crisper and better looking than its predecessor. The music does get a tad annoying though, with prevalent repetition and simple themes. Personally however, the biggest issue for me was the walk animation for Dan and Ben…their spidery legs flip flopping around as they moved was like nails on a blackboard for my subconscious. There were however two problems that the graphics and UI caused. Firstly, there are going to be one or two pixel hunts, especially if you’re playing in the standard small window, which is expected but no less irritating.

However, what was incredibly annoying was the occasional inability to select something with the cursor, either not highlighting at all or selecting the wrong thing. More than once was this a problem and held up several puzzles due to missing small or hidden objects that might be assumed to be background art.

So the big one that we’ve so far skirted around….the humour. These games are thick with British pub humour, old references and swearing. To start with it’s endearing, but over time it can become a tad cloying, with almost every exchange quip laden, every sentence some kind of joke or comic aside. On the whole the humour is good, and there aren’t any obvious dips, but the quantity of jocularity can become fatiguing, and at times it’s just too much of a good thing. This could certainly be thought of as the unique selling point of the games, and what with the generally good puzzle design and dialogue makes them stand out. But be very aware that you’re in for machine gun jokes and bad language…something that whilst might be normal in a pub environment really isn’t in an average game!

BTDT and TGP could be considered lost gems from the heyday of the genre, and certainly fans who want something a little different are unlikely to be disappointed. However, the overall narrative is somewhat shallow at times and can lead a player to head scratching moments of confusion…Hitler and his Nazi Dinosaurs must be stopped, and coat hangers erased from history (yep you read that right) but what am I supposed to be doing next? This is made more problematic by the multitude of locations available and inventory items to use, something which tends to be more streamlined in modern games.

Go in to these games for a good time, don’t be too scared about reaching for a guide (though please do try first as most of these problems are cleverly constructed) and there’ll be very little to disappoint. Offering 6 to 8 hours of gameplay it’s a bargain, more so during any sales. And for the record this is exactly what British people are like….exactly….to think we used to have an empire!

All I ask of any game is that it does what it sets out to do and does it well enough to be fun. That's why I can thumb up hidden object games and super bare-bones indie titles, because I don't expect every game to be Invisible, Inc. or The Talos Principle. This is one of those rare times when that's not enough, however. Time Gentlemen, Please! and Ben There, Dan That! certainly do what they set out to do and do it competently, but the bargain-basement mechanics and severely dated humor sets them too far back to recommend in this day and age.

Ben There, Dan That! (the first game in the series, despite the pack name) follows the adventures of Ben and Dan as they quest to get their broken television working. This gets them sucked up into an alien spaceship full of portals to alternate dimensions, where they must assemble the items they need to return home. Once they do, an even more ridiculous set of events ties the conclusion into the opening of Time Gentlemen, Please! where Ben and Dan rule the world. A characteristically bone-headed decision on their part annihilates humanity, and they have to fuck up the timestream even worse to set it all right again.

It's a hell of an adventure that could have been pretty engaging, had it been handled better. Right away, the games make some painfully amateur mistakes to hook the player by starting right in the middle of an adventure, explaining virtually nothing, and then segueing directly into their dumb TV woes. At no point are you going to get a compelling reason to care about their misadventures, partly because this setup is so weak and partly because it only serves to propel all their jokes. It's a parody game through and through, but one you've doubtless seen before at this point. There are the jokes about looting homes for items, about grabbing useless items because they'll be needed, and every other bit of point-and-click metahumor that Sam and Max did better.

The puzzling at least does its job, but only barely. Each area or dimension you end up in has an unspoken objective, usually to get the random item that unlocks the next area. With a limited number of scenes and items to interact with, you're likely to stumble upon the puzzle solutions before you even realize there are puzzles present. That's exactly what happened to me in the dimension where America took over England, I just clicked a few funny lines with the pub-goers and clicked the items present, and that was all it took. Despite having old-school commands for look and use and talk and items and use your partner Dan, all you need to do is grab the right items and talk to the right people and you're golden the whole way through.

I think what really pushed this one over the line from passable to intolerable was the art style. We're talking MSPaint here, all the way down to the animations which are pretty much two frames each. Ben and Dan gyrate around like a pair of demented cactuars and everyone else is barely alive, usually just with blinking eyes or wiggling fingers. The plain landscapes certainly make it easy to find the few items there are but foul up the dialogue something fierce. They went with the LucasArts-style floating colored text but without the chunky pixels or intelligent color choices, the outlines of backgrounds and letters blend together into a nasty, eye-straining mess.

I'm sure these two titles would have found more favor eight years ago, when adventure games were still sort-of-but-not-really dead and metahumor hadn't been beaten even deader by Borderlands. But even then I can't say I would have enjoyed them because they make so many little mistakes that add up to big headaches. More than that, though, there's nothing of substance to help you power through other than some awfully belabored jokes. I can tolerate a rough or even bad game for awhile but I have little patience for parodies that are not on point, and these two lost the point long, long ago.



Did you enjoy this review? I certainly hope so, and I certainly hope you'll check out more of them at https://goldplatedgames.com/ or on my curation page!

It pains me somewhat to give both of these games a negative review since I'm a huge fan of Point & Click adventure games and the game stars two friends named Ben & Dan. From the start, the user interface and controls are a mess and a nightmare. You simply cannot left or right click something or somewhere, you have to scroll through several different actions just to do anything. This becomes incredibly tedious and inefficient - why can't the controls be like every other point & click adventure game? The game features no voice acting at all, so at times the player is stuck listening to no music or the same music looped over and over. Sometimes the diagloue goes on way too long and is very uninteresting. The game tries to be funny with its own unique humor, but it really is overdone and becomes bland fast. There is a lot of backtracking so moving back and forth to the same areas becomes a chore just to progress and the puzzles are also pretty irratating. Some puzzles just do not make any sense and the art/animation is simply not my style: it is pretty terrible. There are a ton of other point and click adventure games out there, which are way more fun - so steer clear of this one unless you want to be in for a lackluster painful ride.

If you enjoy adventure games you could do a lot worse than chosing this one. It may not be the most polished or fancy adventure game but it's humorus and entertaining enough that I emjoyed my time playing through both.

The game is very British so if you are turned off by the dry UK style of humor, you may want to avoid it.

For everyone else who enjoyed the old Lucasarts games like Sam and Max and Monkey Island will enjoy these and there are plenty of in-jokes and references.

Probably my favorite point-and-click, Time etc + Ben etc has great environments, witty dialogue and a silly storyline. Hugely underrated, and it goes to like £0.10 in the sales. Definitely worth that, and I'd say it's worth a fair bit more than what the full price is.
Get it.

If you don't like point and click adventures, you won't like this. If this is among your first point and click adventures, you won't understand or appreciate this game. Play a few others first. At the very least, play the Monkey Island series first.

These two games contain two types of humor: absurd, potty humor and jokes that poke fun at point and click game design and the thought process of players. Some of my favorite moments in the game happen when Ben and Dan bicker about picking up random objects or trying to combine two very different inventory items. Ben and Dan frequently break character to talk about the merits and downfalls of the genre. They are aware that they are living in an adventure game world. I view these games as commentary on point and clicks first and a ridiculous tale about time travel, aliens, and Hitler second. The art style feels intentional rather than amateur. One of my favorite aspects of adventure games is the wide variety of art styles, so the graphics here don't bother me at all.

That said, I think that the first game (Ben There, Dan That) is slightly stronger because its jokes don't stoop to the same level of disgustingness as its sequel. Some of the sequel's jokes nearly cross the line and seem to exist for the shock value. I appreciate the humor more when it's better integrated with the point and click meta commentary. There are also a few puzzles which, while funny, aren't very intuitive. Especially in the sequel, you'll be asking yourself "What's my overall goal again...?"

I'd rate both games 4/5. I enjoyed them because I enjoy point and clicks. And when I play other adventure games in the future, I have no doubt that Ben and Dan will be in my mind cracking jokes about the silly inventory items I try to combine out of desperation.

Awesome little adventure game! Very creative and with intresting twists!
Expect British humor here and there.
It's a MUST have for it's price! Especially if you are old school adventure-quest player!

First things first: If you are new to the Point&Click-Adventure Genre, you should not start with this.
Ben and Dan are obviously two veterans of the genre and the games pretty much expect some basic knowledge from you.

I cannot call myself a veteran, but I made it through both games, but I have to admit, that some (or maybe some more) of the puzzles can be mindbendingly puzzling and/or irritating.
I kinda think that that should be part of a P&C, though.

The story itself is pretty hilarious and totally crazy. I think the humour is kinda British but I didn't really have trouble with it. I found the game very funny.

Unless you want this to be your first impression of Point & Click adventures, do get it!

Don't judge a book by it's cover because holy shit this is an ACTUALLY CHALLENGING point and click series, worth far more than $5. Maybe $5 for each individual game god damn. The fourth wall breaking and brit humor just polishes it all off.

Ben and Dan are a pair of seasoned point-and-click adventurers who also happen to be your average British smartasses – though their jokes tend to be noticeably dumber (in a good way) and dirtier (again, in a good way). While trying to fix their TV in time for a relaxing episode of Magnum, P.I. they set off a chain of events which leads to the universe-hopping and time-jumping plots of Ben There, Dan That! and its sequel, Time Gentlemen, Please! The places and times they visit get sillier and sillier, but who really needs a deep plot when you've got good jokes?

Heavily influenced by classic point-and-click adventure games, both of the Ben and Dan games take their sense of humor and game feel from those old titles. Every line is a bad joke, an embarrassing pun, or an eye-rolling bit of meta-humor, and it's all a blast to read. The writing hits that perfect tone of "smart in the dumbest way" and keeps the energy high with line after line of funny, stupid goodness. It's hard not to be impressed with the writers when the necessary evil of attempted item combinations yields lines that are just as funny as the main dialogue. There must be thousands of lines across both of these games, and I can't think of even one that I didn't enjoy. The art style works into this, too, with a rough look that is nevertheless very charming, colorful, and quite cohesive across every level.

Of course, while old adventure games were remembered for their writing and aesthetics, their gameplay isn't remembered quite so fondly. Unfortunately, Ben and Dan sometimes dive headfirst into those nasty pitfalls. For every few puzzles that goes along smoothly and logically, there will be a puzzle that will absolutely stump you, leading to far too much time mucking about in an overflowing inventory or with the finicky interface. The later puzzles of both games tend to throw logic out the window and require solutions that, while amusing once you know about them, are basically impossible to find without a walkthrough. Still, despite taking the bad with the good of the classic adventure genre, I'd say that the good is easily good enough to outweigh some awkwardness in design. Worthy new entries into a near-forgotten genre.

"Ben There, Dan That!", the first game, was actually the better of the two I think. They've both got the same awful (mostly on purpose) graphics, and annoying UI, but the writing was better in the first game. "Time Gentlemen" had way more backtracking and the humour was less clever and more of the fart joke type of humour. Still, for the very, very cheap price I paid for this I can't complain. Definitely enjoyed "Ben There, Dan That!" a lot more, although I can't say I recommend the games unless you can pick them up for roughly the ridiculous price I paid of 40c. Otherwise, there are better adventure games out there.

I've only played Ben There, Dan That! so far, but I'm guessing the quality is similar across the two games. And that quality level is very, very high. This is a fun, funny, and well-considered nod to the first generation of adventure games. In fact, in terms of the writing, it's better than quite of a few of the oldies. The banter between Ben and Dan is consistently amusing, occasionally hilarious, and always very snappy. Outside of that, the game is like a grown-up version of all the games of old. You get into some relatively adult situations, with a lot of amoral behavior, including a few murders, but it somehow remains totally light. Absolutely recommended for any veteran adventure gamer.