Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders is the second SCUMM game from Lucasfilm Games (aka LucasArts), after Maniac Mansion, with game development led by David Fox, and with Matthew Alan Kane as co-designer and co-programmer. It was originally released for the Commodore 64 in 1988, and this enhanced FM Towns port was published in Japan in 1990 by Fujitsu. The game is playable in both English and Japanese.

The story is set in 1997 (nine years after the game’s initial release), and the plot follows Zak McKracken (a writer for the National Inquisitor – a low-grade tabloid newspaper); Annie Larris (a freelance scientist), and Melissa China and Leslie Bennett (two Yale University students) in their attempt to thwart the nefarious alien “Caponians” from taking over the world. The Caponians have taken over “The Phone Company” and are slowly reducing the intelligence of everybody on Earth by emitting a 60Hz “hum” from their “Mind Bending Machine“. The Skolarians, another ancient alien race, have left a defence mechanism (“The Skolarian Device“) that will repulse the Caponians, but it requires reassembly and start-up. The parts for this device are spread in various places around Earth and Mars, and Zak and his friends must find them and stop the Caponians from turning everyone stupid…

The game is a humorous mouse-controlled point-and-click adventure with a Verb Chart (in green) that you click on to perform actions. Items are shown as text below the Verb Chart (in purple). Dialogue and conversations are shown as text at the top of the screen. There’s no voice acting in this game, though.

Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders arguably set the template for many of the classic SCUMM adventures that followed – moreso even than Maniac Mansion. Like having puzzles that change every time you start a new game, and having parts of the game be relatively open-ended, in that: you can visit some locations (and tackle their associated puzzles) in any order you like. It’s not quite the finished article, though. The Verb Chart in this isn’t quite as streamlined or as intuitive as those seen in Fate of Atlantis or the Monkey Island games, but it works well enough nonetheless.

Overall, Zak McKracken is still a great game, and the enhanced 256-colour graphics and remastered digital audio soundtrack of the FM Towns version are really nice – compared to the original MS-DOS version. In fact: the version of Zak McKracken that’s available on Steam and gog.com (at the time of writing) features both the enhanced FM Towns version, and the original MS-DOS EGA version, which is great to see. Especially as the enhanced version of the game has never been released outside of Japan before.

Another small detail that makes the FM Towns version of Zak McKracken interesting is that – when the game is played in Japanese – the eyes of all the characters are replaced with ‘anime’ eyes! I’ve included screenshots of that at the end of this review so you can see what it looks like.

One final note: because Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders does come from a bygone era of video gaming, it can lead to situations where the game becomes unwinnable – if you do the wrong thing (like run out of money; have one of the main characters die, or even use a crucial item incorrectly). So it’s probably a good idea to have a walkthrough on hand, and to utilise your saves carefully, so you don’t paint yourself into a proverbial corner and find yourself having to re-start the game from the very beginning again. That can happen if you’re not careful!

More: Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders on Wikipedia
Steam: Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders on Steam
GOG: Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders on GOG.com