Plan 9 From Outer Space was originally a sci-fi film, released in 1957 directed by Ed Wood. For many years, Plan 9 was the default answer whenever the question "What was the worst movie ever made?" came up, whether people had seen the movie or not.
In more recent years, thanks largely to the Tim Burton movie "Ed Wood" and the comedic commentary of Rifftrax, a reappraisal of Plan 9 has taken place, and it turns out a lot of people kind of like it. The movie now has a positive 66% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Far from the worst movie ever made.
That's the background for Plan 9 From Outer Space, a point-and-click adventure game released in 1992 on Amiga, Atari ST, and DOS. Plan 9 was designed by an Irish office of the British Gremlin Graphics group, and released in the U.S. by Konami.
I do not intend to explain the movie in this post. It's well worth your time to go watch it if you've never seen it. Some knowledge of the movie is useful to understand some of the references in the game, but not totally necessary.
The basic plot of the game is that Bela Lugosi's body double has stolen the 6 reels that constitute the Plan 9 movie. Apparently, some 33 years after release, he's still upset about it being called "The worst movie ever" so he's stolen it so he can insert more scenes of himself and to colorize the movie. Your goal is to retrieve the reels and keep the movie as is.
I will give the game some credit very early on. The opening credits absolutely nail the style of the movie's credits. The MIDI theme music is cheesy, but kind of enjoyable.
As I mentioned earlier, Plan 9 is a point-and-click adventure. The screen is set up in a fairly standard way. The action takes place is a small central window, your inventory is always on screen on the right hand side, any text shows up under the screen, and all of your actions are on a headstone in the right hand corner next to a questionable quality drawing of Vampira..
It works well, but sometimes it feels like there is a lot of wasted space.
Nearly every character you meet as you play the game either looks like Tor Johnson or Vampira.
The game proceeds in a pretty typical manner. You go into a room, look around until the cursor changes shape, and then use every action available to you until one of them does something. Whatever you can pick up will eventually be useful, so grab everything. Don't worry, you have infinite pockets.
I think this is where my admission / rant goes. As I've grown older, I've definitely lost patience with certain dumb things. One of those things is puzzles in point-and-click adventure games. Don't get me wrong. I like a good puzzle where the answer is solvable using logic. What I don't like is the kind of puzzle you can only solve by doing something that doesn't make sense or is illogical at that point in the game, which seems to be a hallmark of the point-and-click adventure game genre.
For the record, when in a "trophy room" full of animal heads on the wall... pushing a mounted antelope head is not even in the top 5 things I'd consider doing. A minor example, but one of several I came across that was more frustrating than clever.
In some of the reviews and promotional materials I found about this game, they claimed that you would explore many of the locations from the movie. This...isn't quite true. You get a little bit of fan service when they show you the "clown car crypt" from the early part of the movie.
Plus, you do get to visit the iconic airplane cockpit...although that co-pilot looks oddly familiar.
Eventually, the game takes you on a bizarre worldwide goose chase searching for these 6 reels. Apparently the chiropractor that replace Lugosi after he died got around, as you have to travel to several different countries in order to find everything. And Criswell help you if you miss something the first time you visit a location, because backtracking can take forever.
Once you get all the reels back, you can return to the movie studio where you started the game, and head into the editing room to review footage from the movie. I initially thought this was going to be an awesome thing. Ultimately, it turned out to be another disappointment as the video clips were exceptionally grainy, and only a couple seconds long each.
Without spoiling anything (because, who knows, you might go play it), getting the reels back isn't the end of the game. As you discover one last clue, which sends you on one last goose chase. A goose chase that leads you to finding out the actual plot of the game in a crazily bizarre info dump mere seconds before a "The end" card and getting dumped back to a DOS prompt.
Graphically, the game isn't too bad. Almost everything is a static screenshot. What little animation there is works. Some of the scenes are very pleasing to the eye.
There isn't a ton of music in the game, mostly atmospheric background tones that kind of get lost.
Ultimately, the biggest crime of this game is that it doesn't actually have anything to do with Plan 9 From Outer Space until the last 30-40 seconds during the final info dump. This game could be about anything at all. Which is a shame because I do actually think a campy Plan 9 game could be a fair bit of fun. This just misses the mark. Also, the game is short. Really short. If you don't have to do a whole lot of backtracking, the game takes just over an hour to play, which is shorter than the actual movie. Which you should watch instead. Seriously. It's a ton of fun.
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