Edna and Harvey: The Breakout

I love point and click adventure games

This is an unusual game.

Oh, I don’t mean the genre. Point and click adventure games are a dime a dozen, dating back from the halcyon days of the 90’s where you couldn’t take two steps in a video game store without tripping over five or six of them. No, I mean it’s an unusual game for a variety of reasons that surpass the limitations of other games of its type.

Allow me to elaborate.

The main character is Edna Konrad, a young woman with amnesia who is locked in a padded cell with only her blue stuffed bunny Harvey for company. She doesn’t know why she’s there, she doesn’t know who she is, and she has no idea why Harvey can talk or why no one else can hear him, but she’s pretty sure a mistake has been made somewhere as she isn’t crazy...and she can have Harvey back her up on that if she has to.

You tell that paper Edna. You tell it GOOD.

The two of them are delightfully cracked. Edna’s Tabula Rasa is heavily influenced by Harvey’s whimsically destructive nature. He claims to be a manifestation of her subconscious mind and that he has the key to her lost memories and it is Harvey who will be her constant companion throughout the game. In fact, he can also send Edna back into her memories in a sort of flashback sequence which he calls ‘tempomorphing.’

The first of these flashbacks occurs while they are still trapped in her padded cell. Harvey knows a trick Edna knew once that can help them escape. To the past, Harvey!

Edna, Harvey, and Mathis in the interactive 'tempomorphing' flashbacks.

The flashback sequences have peaceful music and slightly different gameplay from the present. The principal characters are Edna, Harvey, Edna’s long suffering father Mathis, an annoying snot of a boy named Alfred, and his father Dr. Marcel, the director of the asylum where Edna is being held prisoner in the present. Huh, interesting coincidence that.

During these sequences you can switch between controlling young Edna and Harvey, who is mysteriously able to walk around on his own now. He cannot influence the world in any way, but he can grab stuff in the background and ‘save’ them as conversational topics to discuss with Edna. This is a neat little mechanic and I immensely enjoyed gathering objects and images for later discussion whilst I ambled about on Harvey’s stuffed bunny feet. These flashbacks are unfortunately few and far between and there is something slightly off about them, which I noticed immediately, but couldn’t quite understand the significance of until later in the plot.

You see, it’s fine playing as Harvey so long as you are in the same room as Edna, but I grew slightly alarmed when I was exploring places and looking at things Edna could not possibly be able to see and then going back to talk with Edna about them. It worried me a bit, but at first it seemed harmless enough, so I pressed on and tried to uncover the truth of the matter. I won’t go into exactly what I discovered, but things are definitely not as they seem at first glance.

Speaking of insanity, I’ll take a few minutes to elaborate on exactly what makes this game so much fun to play. Two words: ‘object interaction.’ Nearly everything can be combined with nearly everything else and you’ll get item specific dialogue for almost all of it. Want to find out what happens if you use the scissors you picked up with the flimsy paper cup you have? Go for it! Now try the scissors with everything else in your inventory and find out what Edna says. Now use the scissors on everything in the background on every screen and watch as she vandalizes everything from potted plants to posters on the walls to couches and chairs. Oh, you found a pen? Write ‘Edna rules’ and ‘Edna was here’ on various objects within the asylum.

There’s no real point to vandalizing almost everything you can find...but you can if you want to.

I have spent, way, WAY too much time in this room, mixing and matching different things with the background.

There are hidden jokes everywhere and the game rewards a patient and meticulous player enormously. I spent the majority of my twenty five hour playthrough combining all of the stuff in my inventory with all of the other stuff in my inventory, all of the stuff in the backgrounds, showing it off to various people I met in the asylum, and getting Harvey’s thoughts on everything.

Let me give you a few of the more entertaining examples.

Edna is schizophrenic, so the option ‘talk to’ has real application almost everywhere. Walk through the halls of the asylum and strike up conversations with chairs, tables, doors, posters, the random stuff in your inventory, light switches, etc. etc. etc. Much of it will respond to Edna’s queries, though they are apparently voiced by Harvey, as you can see his lips move when objects ‘talk’ to Edna. She doesn’t seem to notice that he’s the one actually doing the ‘talking’ most of the time though.

Yes, yes he DOES.

It’s a wonderfully surreal touch.

A short ways into the game I picked up a comic book, which appears to have no practical application whatsoever within the game. However, the adventures of ‘Captain Useless’ were a source of great amusement to me, read aloud by Edna in a sort of comic book announcer’s voice. Try using it on anything and everything you come across and she’ll come up with custom panels for Captain Useless and his sidekick, Handy Boy.

I found a fake police badge in a box of cornflakes and was henceforth rewarded with Edna speaking in a southern drawl and calling herself ‘Inspector Konrad’ whenever she used it.

All of this was so much fun to do, it may have actually ruined most other games in the point and click adventure genre for me. Why shouldn’t I get custom dialogue for attempting to combine my bottles of ketchup and mustard that I swiped from the cafeteria? Where else am I going to find the equivalent of the marvelous little duet I was presented with, comprised entirely of the words: ‘woodie woodie woo,’ when I tried to use my croquet mallet with a poster? Edna explained to Harvey that she had no idea what I had in mind when I told her to do the action, so she thought she’d just start singing instead.

There are other fourth wall breaking moments, but they don’t feel out of place and they don’t break the immersion because she’s completely nutters. Sure Edna, suuure. There’s a mysterious ‘player’ controlling your actions. Uh huh. Can we get a doctor over here maybe?

Speaking of doctors, the persistent villain of the game is Dr. Marcel, the director of the asylum. It is revealed very early on that Edna’s ‘treatments’ at his hands directly result in her almost complete amnesia afterwards. It is the main goal of the game to escape from his nefarious clutches and restore Edna’s memory, with Harvey’s help of course. The plot is for the most part very lighthearted and funny, despite the subject matter. However, there is a gradual shift in tone about two thirds of the way through the game.

As Edna regains more and more of her memories and grows more lucid, she begins to lose patience with Harvey’s ridiculous comments and destructive urges. Their relationship becomes strained the closer they get to the truth, and what was once amusingly witty and funny within the walls of the asylum becomes rather sad and pathetic outside.

Aww, man. I was not expecting the sads to get me in this game.

There are a few moments that foreshadow the twist at the end of the game and I certainly can’t say that I didn’t see it coming, but it hit me hard, much harder then I thought it would. I had come to care quite a bit about poor, mixed up Edna and her stuffed bunny and the ultimate resolution to the game felt very abrupt. The arbitrary final choice between the two possible endings definitely left a bad taste in my mouth.

It’s a good thing there’s a sequel. Too bad it doesn’t star Edna though.

And so, in conclusion, I would urge you to take a look at the game and see for yourself. It’s wonderfully funny, well written and voiced, and was an amazingly enjoyable experience for me. I feel my opinion may be in the minority here, however. The game’s low metacritic score puzzles me greatly and some of the reviewers’ complaints had me scratching my head and saying to myself, “Did we even play the same game?” My theory is that the game has had an overhaul at some point and those reviews are a bit dated, but whatever.

Other complaints are about the buggy nature of the game itself, which is definitely an issue. There are some points where the game just crashes to the desktop when you try to use something with something else, or the dialogue will flash on the screen and no voice acting will be played. There was even one game breaking bug which you need to download a workaround off of the steam forums for, but if you know about these issues beforehand, you should be fine going in prepared for them.

The other principal complaints are about the puzzles, (Huh. Annoying puzzles in a point and click adventure game? Never seen that before.) the excessive dialogue, (Really? Really? You’re complaining about my favorite part of the game.) and the somewhat amateurish look to the artwork and the animations, so I suppose it’s definitely not for everybody.

Whelp, that’s all the time we have to spend on this. Come on Harvey, let’s get out of here before Dr. Marcel comes back and sees what we did to his desk while he was gone.

....Harvey?