DISAPPOINT AND CLICK: A 3D EXPERIMENT
Normality is a forgotten oddity, a genre mash-up from Gremlin Interactive that I briefly toyed with as a teenager. It combines a two-and-a-half-dimensional engine (Ã la the original Doom) with point-and-click adventure mechanics, resulting in something quite unlike anything I’ve played before or since—save perhaps Gremlin’s own Realms of the Haunting. On paper, it’s an intriguing experiment. In practice, it ends up combining the worst aspects of both genres, like a reverse centaur with the horse part on top and the human part underneath.
The story, tonally inspired by rad ’90s movies like Wayne’s World and Beavis and Butt-Head Do America, has aged spectacularly poorly. It goes for juvenile satire, depicting a cartoon dystopia where everyone is required to dress, speak, and behave “normally.” Any deviation is punished. This is what happens to the zany protagonist, Kent Knutson, when he commits the rebellious act of whistling while walking down the street. He’s arrested, thrown in a cell, and—because of course—someone slips him a note suggesting he seek out a resistance movement somewhere in the city.
Once you escape the game’s “tutorial room” (your own apartment), the adventure proper begins, and almost immediately the interface and perspective start working against you. This is a game where you pick up everything not nailed down, because you might need it later. In classic adventure fashion, you combine inventory items to create distractions, gain access to restricted areas, and bribe various characters around the city.
The problem is scale. With a world map divided into several large areas, Normality covers far too much ground. Items are often placed where they make no logical sense, making it difficult to infer what to look for or where it might be. Visual clutter doesn’t help. An insignificant wall texture could be vital, and while some puzzles are accompanied by painfully obvious hints, others rely on illogical leaps that can stall progress for ages.
Some items are red herrings, others part of alternate solutions I never even considered. The result is an inventory bloated with junk, prolonging the inevitable “try everything on everything” phase you enter once all reason has been exhausted. On the plus side—and it is a big one—you can never lock yourself into an unwinnable state. There are no dead ends.
Controls are another sore point. Using mouse and keyboard feels clunky and overbearing. First-person movement is too direct and busy, and the field of view is uncomfortably narrow. Classic point-and-click adventures handled movement gracefully: you clicked somewhere and the character simply went there. In Normality, everything must be done manually, which steals attention away from what should be the core activity—thinking through bizarre puzzle solutions.
In traditional adventures, finding items was never about perspective or physical placement. You scanned the screen with the cursor, highlighted hotspots, and moved on. It was relaxed, almost meditative. Here, you sprint around like a maniac, stopping every few seconds to see what’s interactable. Right-clicking brings up a verb interface—talk, use, pick up, open, examine—but small or moving objects are difficult to target. You often have to time your clicks precisely. The first-person view forces you to scour every room from floor to ceiling, and frequent backtracking is mandatory, since story progression may unlock new interactions in previously visited areas.
Without a guide, a playthrough can grind to a complete halt for hours. The story does nothing to justify that time sink. It relies heavily on stoner humor and wordplay, with wildly inconsistent voice acting and recording quality. Dialogue is unskippable, meaning you’ll hear the same lines repeated endlessly whenever you try the wrong item. As the absurd tone bleeds into the puzzle logic, the overall experience can only be described as ass.
That said, genre mash-ups are worth celebrating, and I respect Gremlin for trying. Experimentation is how genuinely new ideas are born, and occasionally entire subgenres emerge from it. More developers should tinker with the point-and-click format. Quest for Glory (1989–98), for instance, successfully blended adventure design with RPG mechanics, allowing puzzles to be solved in multiple ways depending on class choice.
First-person point-and-click adventures, however, never gained traction—and for good reason. They combined the wrong elements from otherwise compatible genres. Instead of adding richer dialogue, deeper puzzles, or stronger narratives to the Doom framework, they stapled the Doom perspective onto traditional adventure gameplay. Normality could have worked as a conventional point-and-click game. As it stands, it offers little justification for its own existence, except perhaps as a cautionary tale: let the crazy dead genre hybrids rest in pieces.
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