The Neverhood (also called The Neverhood Chronicles, released in Japan as Klaymen Klaymen: The Mystery of Neverhood) is a 1996 point-and-click adventure video game developed by The Neverhood, Inc. And published by DreamWorks Interactive for Microsoft Windows.The game follows the adventure of a claymation character named Klaymen as he discovers his origins and his purpose in a world made. 1001 Video Games The Neverhood appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott. Animation According to Douglas TenNapel, The Neverhood required 3.5 tons of clay and was comprised of 50,000 frames of animation. The production took five animators over a year to complete the game.
A few months back I wrote a guide on how to obtain a copy of the Neverhood. However, due to the evolution of computers, running the game isn't a simple as installing it off the CD and clicking play. This guide will explain how to play the Neverhood using ScummVM, which runs on all common operating systems (Windows, OSX, Linux) and more (iOS, Android, PSP, PS3, and others).
What is ScummVM?
For our purposes, you can consider ScummVM to be a program that, given the Neverhood game files, will run the game on almost any operating system. It is free, open-source and legal. You will require a copy of ScummVM to follow this guide (explained more below).
More specifically, ScummVM is actually a virtual machine containing rewritten implementations of the engines of many older games. I don't want to go into a large amount of detail, but you may wish to explore it more yourself. You can learn about it here and view the supported games list here.
Step 1: Obtain Neverhood game files
To play the Neverhood using ScummVM you will need to obtain a copy of the Neverhood. You can do so by following my guide here; unfortunately there is no legal way to download the Neverhood, but the guide offers some alternatives.
Once you have obtained the game, you will see that the CD/root directory containing the game files is laid out something like this:
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AUTORUN.INF
DATA/
nhood.ico
readme.txt
setup/
SETUP.EXE
setup95.exe
We actually only care about one of these: the folder called DATA. In this folder there are 7 .blb files. As long as you have these files, you have everything you need - even if you don't have the other files. Ensure these files are in a folder on a drive in your computer (as opposed to the CD; copy them off), and you're good to go.
Step 2: Obtain and install ScummVM
Next, navigate to here. You will want to download a copy of ScummVM for your operating system, and install. This will be different for each system, but most simply follow the usual install methods for that system. For Windows, I recommend the install over the zipfile. For Mac, you will want the 'with Sparkle Disk Image' file.
Step 3: Add Neverhood to ScummVM games list
Once ScummVM is installed, open it. Click 'Add Game...' on the right-hand side. You will then need to navigate to the folder containing the the 7 .blb files, and press 'Select'/'Choose'. If a window pops up in ScummVM, click 'OK' for now; we can change these details later (and will in fact do so in the next step).
At this point, the Neverhood is installed and available for play; you can play it by selecting it in the window and clicking 'Start'. However, you may wish to change some settings first, which we will do in the next step.
Step 4: Configure settings
Select the game in the window and click 'Edit Game...'. You can change a number of things here, but in my opinion, only two things need to be examined.
First, click the 'Engine' tab. You may wish to tick the first box; this uses the original save/load screens, as opposed to a new screen that ScummVM uses. The next two boxes are completely up to you.
Second, click the 'Graphics' tab. By default, the game will run in windowed mode. If you wish to play it fullscreen, first click the 'Override' box, then click the 'Fullscreen' box.
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I have not yet worked out how to play the game in fullscreen but not stretched to fill a widescreen; you may wish to play around with the settings in the 'Graphics' tab to try and get this to work. You may also wish to play around with the other tabs too.
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Once you are done with the settings, click 'OK'. You are now ready to play.
Step 5: Play the game
Play the game by selecting it in the window and clicking 'Start'. The game will then boot and play as normal. The only gameplay difference I have found between this version and the original is that the cheats no longer work; however, the only useful cheat was fast-forwarding the Hall of Records, which can be disabled in the 'Engine' tab of the settings anyway (will require a restart of ScummVM).
To leave the game, quit as usual using the button in the ESC menu; remember to save!
To play in the future, just open ScummVM again, select the game in the window, and press 'Start'. You now have The Neverhood working on your machine!
Hope this guide helps you out and answers your questions! Feel free to post questions in the comments if you have any, I'll try to answer them as soon as I can!