Review: The Manhole – Masterpiece Edition is a post from: Best Iphone Apps Review Website
Of the three factors that drew me to The Manhole, none of them turned out to work in the game’s favor. It’s an adventure game without any puzzles. It’s inspired by Alice in Wonderland. And, it’s made by Cyan Worlds, the studio which crafted Myst’s isolate, mysterious environment.
Considering these points a priori, The Manhole could be mistaken for an interactive fairy tale — a handcrafted pop-up book with buttons and patchworks sewn into its pages. I played it, then reconsidered. The Manhole is closer in definition to a nursery rhyme scribbled down on a cocktail napkin, with crumbs crumpled up in the corner, and maybe a food stain here or there.
I’m not referring to the nursery rhymes with wordplays that cheerfully disguise a hard fact of life, like Old Mother Hubbard, nor those that vaguely suggest something malicious, such as beheadings and acts of political intrigue, but just the melody of a nursery rhyme played from a mobile dangling over a crib.
Adaptations of Alice in Wonderland have always been weird. The upcoming sequel to American McGee’s Alice casts Alice as a rehabilitated mental patient on the verge of a relapse. In Jan Svankmajer’s Alice, creepy porcelain dolls and taxidermied rabbits — which hobble in arrhythmic stop-motion — reside down the Rabbit Hole. Even Disney’s Wonderland is awash in psychedelia.
The Manhole isn’t a literal, nor half-literal, interpretation of Lewis Carroll’s classic. Rand and Robyn Miller, the brothers who founded Cyan Worlds to make interactive children’s games for PC in the late eighties, took pieces of the story — a character here, a set piece there — and weaved them into their own uneventful yarn about animals… that stand around… and talk about stuff.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and the oft-accompanied Through the Looking Glass, are books that fascinate children and adults alike. A child might be delighted by the pompous characterization of Humpty Dumpty, while adults are more likely to muse over his drunken logic when he says, “a word… means just what I choose it to mean.”
The Manhole appeals to neither, and would only hold the attention of a tyke who’s learning to move the cursor around the screen for the first time — a scenario that’s been removed from the equation after the game’s migration to touch screen.
Exploration carries the ominous feeling that you’re walking in circles. The white rabbit’s abode consists of a scant amount of rooms interconnected by ladders, tunnels, and halls leading to nowhere. The lackluster characters encountered between flights of stairs erupt in foolish harangues, the likes of which make Hey Diddle Diddle seem like Shakespeare, or Alice in Chains sound like Animal Collective.
The Manhole does itself no favors by alluding to an endearing children’s classic, which it only superficially resembles. Adding the word “Masterpiece” to the title doesn’t help matters either, and makes me question whether the game’s curators have taken Humpty Dumpty’s logic to heart.
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