Can confirm that googling “och den är helt självrengörande och Nils Vedin” doesn’t turn up anything useful.
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I can’t wait to see who finds this “easy mode”.
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There’s a lot more to grasp at in video form:
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This isn’t Day of the Tentacle, is it?
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Pajama Sam: No Need to Hide When It’s Dark Outside. Ingen aning om vad det heter på svenska.
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gurl, u gettin’ close
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Is it Putt-Putt?
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It is not, though he is in the game.
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Is it just Pajama Sam 2?
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Not a Pajama Sam! I don’t think any of those ever came out in Swedish… I feel like Huggly’s Sleepover, which is somewhat adjacent, may have – but googlin’ around, it seems like that may be a childhood delusion of mine.
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Wait, is this Freddy Fish?
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I can’t guess, but I’ll just note that this is tickling that edutainment late 1990s part of me.
ETA: Seeing the answer now, yes, I definitely played this in middle school in the late 1990s. I guess it was for children rather than being “edutainment,” but that school context flavored the way I remembered the game.
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Spy Fox? Just naming the other one
Wow, I’ve never heard of any of these games. Time to edutain myself!
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The first time I understood the Sid Meier statement that games are a series of interesting choices was when I got to pick the color to spray paint Putt-Putt for the parade
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It is Freddi Fish!!! Specifically, the first game, Freddi Fish and the Case of the Missing Kelp Seeds in Swedish – i.e. Freddi Fisk och Fallet med de Försvunna Sjögräsfröna. As Humongous Entertainment’s first fully hand-animated point-’n’-click game, it was localized into a glut of different languages, Swedish included. No other Humongous games ever were, to my knowledge (though several games by Hulabee – Ron Gilbert’s post-Humongous joint – were). I have to imagine it didn’t entirely make financial sense.
(I’ve spent my entire life thinking the sailor’s name was Nils Ledin. My world has been turned upside-down.)
Freddi Fish truly is an incredible game – lavish hand-animated graphics; each screen packed with little incidental click-triggered animations; a terrific calypso soundtrack… All this, in 1994.
One thing that struck me deeply while playing Freddi Fish is this: The West was so far ahead of Japan in adventure game design at this point. Released the year after Freddi Fish, for example, was Clock Tower – a point-’n’-click game that – while its charm, atmosphere, and short length make it a lovely experience – is an utter mess game design-wise (boatloads of arbitrary triggers for unrelated events) and not particularly technologically impressive.
You might think it’s unfair to compare a SNES game to one for Windows 3.x, but rather, that’s part of why the West was so ahead. In the Anglosphere, IBM PCs were ubiquitous enough for the market to support a high-budget children’s point-’n’-click adventure. Add to that Ron Gilbert revolutionizing adventure game design with his design manifesto “Why Adventure Games Suck”, Trojan-horsed into the hearts of players and designers alike by way of the 1990 The Secret of Monkey Island, and the West had quite the set of giants’ shoulders to stand on.
Meanwhile, Japan was still smack-dab in the middle of its awkward transition from domestic computers (PC-98, X68000, FM Towns…) to Windows-equipped IBM PCs. PC games were still (and would, arguably, remain to this day) a world for nerds and geeks. Japan’s forays into multimedia CD-ROM experiences largely happened on consoles,[1] where they didn’t find quite as natural a home as a Myst or a The Neverhood did on PCs. And the point-’n’-click genre? The point-’n’-click genre never really took off there in the first place. Gilbert’s philosophy sure never made it across the Pacific pond – obtuseness and obscurity weren’t yet off the table.
That’s not to discount the immense merit of Japan’s lineage of adventure games – in the ’90s, emotional, atmospheric, down-to-earth experiences like the horror adventures Twilight Syndrome or Yūyamidōri Tankentai, or the visual novel or dating sim genres (which both largely grew out of Japanese-style adventure games) could never have come out of the West. My view, however, is that they were still experimenting wildly, while Western adventure games had been codified, polished, and had matured to an ultimate form that they still more or less keep to this day.
Not that Japan didn’t experiment with multimedia on PCs – it just wasn’t as visible or consequential. ↩︎
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(total shot in the dark voice) Pandemonium?
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It is not Pandemonium.
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Luigi’s Mansion on the DS
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