Review by: Brian Pipa
Published: August 11, 1997

What do you get when you combine twin suns, paratrooping hot dogs, and a pregnant wife? You get Twinsen’s Odyssey — the latest adventure from Activision and Adeline Software International — the same people that put together the ground-breaking Alone in the Dark series. Twinsen’s Odyssey is the follow-up to the underground hit Relentless: Twinsen’s Adventure (or Little Big Adventure to our foreign readers), and brings us the continuing tale of Twinsen and his quest to save his planet of Twinsun.

The game starts out with an out-of-season thunderstorm and your pet dino-fly (a dinosaur that can fly) gets struck by lightning. Your pregnant wife tells you to go to the pharmacy to get some dino-fly medicine. Of course the pharmacy doesn’t have dino-fly medicine, but you find out where you can get some. In typical adventure fashion, it’s not as easy as it seems. You have to go to Desert Island for the medicine, but the boats won’t go because of the storm, so you have to stop the storm via the Weather Wizard, but the Weather Wizard needs . . . well, you get the idea. All the puzzles seem to be interconnected. As you progress, what you have to do and where/how to do it becomes clearer. When you discover that the alien Sups are kidnapping the local populace and that the Dark Monk is behind it all, you know your real goal.

Twinsen’s Odyssey is a graphic adventure like no other. The graphics have this look to them — a cartoony, 3D, rendered, odd sort of look, but it works. As in the original, the “quadruple-mood” interface is used. Twinsen can be in four different moods and he has different abilities in each. Normal mode is used for walking around and talking to people. Aggressive mode is used for fighting. Sporty mode is used to run and jump, and Discrete mode is used to sneak around (which is very funny) and duck. To change modes, you press the Ctrl key. Luckily, the action stops when you are changing modes; otherwise, I would have been killed many times as I was trying to switch into Aggressive mode. Normal mode was just way too slow for me, so I stayed in Sporty mode for his running ability and used the End key to talk to people instead of the Normal action key.

Speaking of talking to people, all of the characters and conversations are spoken as well as shown on-screen. Some of them are very funny (be sure and talk to all of the kids in the daycare and smack the little girl jumping rope to see what happens), and the voices are all great. The characters range from the semi-normal Grobos (elephant people), the Rabbibunnies (mouse/rabbit people), and the Blafards (mole people) to the outright weird like the Mosquibees (a mosquito/bee combo), the Knartas (sausage people that live in houses that look like inverted hot-dog buns), and the alien Sups (prototypical aliens with triangular heads). There was definitely a wild imagination behind the creation of the characters in Twinsen’s Odyssey.

Once again, the most awkward part of the game is combat. Trying to control Twinsen’s kicks and punches and trying to aim your Magic Ball can be an exercise in frustration. Luckily, the save game feature has been improved, so you can save the game right before a fight breaks out, and keep reloading until you win the fight.

Twinsen’s Odyssey is a lot of fun and I enjoyed playing it. The graphics are beautiful, the music and sound effects are good, and the gameplay is entertaining. Twinsen is a winner in my book. How can you dislike a game with hot dogs (Knartas) as characters?