The Neverhood

About The Neverhood

The Neverhood (1996) is Doug TenNapel's claymation adventure, built from over three tons of clay, in which Klaymen discovers his origins in a deserted world floating over a void, a commercial flop that became a cult classic.

The Neverhood in Depth

The Neverhood is a surreal landscape of buildings suspended over an endless void, strangely deserted apart from Klaymen, the hero; Willie Trombone, a dim helper; Klogg, a warped version of Klaymen and the villain; and fauna including the crab-like "weasels" that chase Klaymen and Willie. Klaymen wakes in a room and explores, collecting discs that tell a story narrated by Willie, viewed on terminals around the land, including the notoriously long Hall of Records, which takes several minutes to cross. They reveal that the Neverhood was made by a god-like being, Hoborg, whose companion Klogg stole his crown, leaving him inert; Willie planted Hoborg's next seed far from Klogg, and it grew into Klaymen. At the end, the player can take the crown and become a new tyrant, or revive Hoborg.

The point-and-click play emphasises solving puzzles through Klaymen's actions rather than an inventory, which is almost absent, and video sequences advance the plot. Careless players can hit game overs, one of which cannot be undone from a save and forces a restart.

Making The Neverhood

TenNapel left Shiny Entertainment in 1995, unhappy with how David Perry ran it, and two weeks later announced his own company, The Neverhood, Inc., staffed by Earthworm Jim veterans. Steven Spielberg's new DreamWorks Interactive, looking for unusual projects, agreed to publish it, with Microsoft also involved. Shown at E3 1996 as The Neverhood: A Curious Wad of Klay Finds His Soul, it was released after a year of work. It "won rave reviews" but sold poorly: only 37,000 copies in the US by August 1997, partly because big stores such as Target did not stock it, though total sales passed 50,000 and Gateway pre-installed "hundreds of thousands" of OEM copies. Critics loved its look but disagreed on its puzzles, GameSpot finding them unfairly abstract. Computer Games Strategy Plus and CNET Gamecenter named it the best adventure of 1996, and Computer Gaming World called it "the coolest-looking game of the year". Skullmonkeys followed in 1998, and many of the team made the spiritual successor Armikrog in 2015.