July 17th, 2024

-i really like this kids pc game-

So I recently set up a virtual machine to play all my old games I’ve had sitting in my office closet, and since I’ve been fiending for some Halloween cheer(yes I know it’s early) I thought I’d look up something spooky, something scary! Something that’s been needling at the back of my mind ever since I looked at the cover of it years and years ago.. My Teacher Fried My Brains!

I couldn’t have been older than 8. I didn’t know where it came from, and I didn’t know where it went, but when I saw that teacher tearing off her face, and the kid suffering what looked to me to be horrible, irreparable brain fryage, my own brain was branded with the image. It’s a wonder I didn’t grow up fearing aliens myself! So when I found a point and click adventure game from 1997 based on the first book, My Teacher is An Alien, I just had to pick it up.

The game throws you right in, playing as friends Peter, Susan and Duncan living their school lives in tandem. They explain how to navigate the school to you. I love when games do this, having the characters talk privately to the player. It’s very indicative of children’s games of this era, and I always eat it up. Depending on who you start with, you get access to a different event. Peter gets to do a puzzle, Duncan gets to shoot a fire alarm to get out of turning in his homework, and Susan gets to talk to the other kids in her class, revealing one of them is acting strangely. Robotically. Whichever one you choose, their stories all converge after Duncan sets off the fire alarm, and in the commotion, they find an alien device hidden in a book.

At the start, the game was quietly letting you know what each of the characters is good at. Puzzles are easier with Peter, communication(especially with adults) is best done by Susan, and action scenes of all kinds are a cinch with Duncan. Similarly, they all have weaknesses, as I found out quickly the moment I tried to be excused from class with Duncan. He’s a punk with a bad reputation, so the teachers never let him leave early, whereas it takes almost nothing from the other kids. Peter moves really slowly during action sequences, and can’t really get information out of anyone due to his “geek” rep. Susan isn’t really particularly good at anything aside from talking to others. She can get what she wants if it involves making people do things or getting info. You have to switch often to get the most out of each day, and you can only switch between periods.

And yeah! Get the most out of each day! This game involves low-level time management! After the kids realize there’s an alien at their school, the game frees you to do whatever you want, quietly implying you only have until the end of the week. Each kid has a schedule, and you can choose to go to class or go explore the cg-rendered school. Don’t be late or miss too many times or you’ll get a detention and lose access to whichever kid you were playing for the period. Your main goal isn’t exactly stated, but each kid will have ideas about what to do during each day. The ultimate goals are to figure out who the alien is, get evidence to expose them, and of course, save the kids they’re abducting and replacing with androids.

And there is so much to find at this school! It’s not Myst levels or anything, but for a kids’ game, it’s perfect. I won’t try to outline all the rooms in the game, but as you play you’ll become very acquainted with the map and where everything leads, and with all the teachers too.. All but three.

We don’t know who the alien is. And if you’ve played the game before(this is a really cool feature), the alien is a DIFFERENT teacher every time! But anyway, the suspect line falls down to the three teachers the kids meet with for their various subjects; Ms. Marsh, Mr. Tucker and Mr. Daniels. All are dodgy, awkward and strangely cold, and honestly I just went with the one that seemed the meanest for my initial suspicion; Ms. Marsh. Although when I found the teacher’s schedules in the office I definitely thought that Jack Daniels had to be a fake name. I mean, come on. That man’s got to be either an alien or involved with something equal to or scarier than any brain frying invader with a name like that. And when you ask them questions, they really don’t help their case.

Eventually, you will end up leaving class for one reason or another, and you’ll inevitably run into your first action sequence.
This is Orville, a mean little freak who accosts you whenever you dare to enter the hallway.

This is where my first problem with the game hits. He and his little friends will toss stink bombs at you, and if you get hit too many times you can say goodbye to doing anything useful this period. That by itself is fine! My problem is, you can’t barely control your character. You use the mouse(which becomes invisible) to move your character, and I don’t know if it was just cuz I was running it on a virtual machine or what, but it’s so hard to move! You can’t just slide your mouse across the screen. It doesn't keep up with your real life movements, and the input area is only within the box the game takes place in, so if you move your mouse too quickly outside the box, you’ll either whip to one side of the screen or won’t move at all. I didn’t beat this minigame once, and eventually just started using the map to fast travel. For some reason, a couple days in, Orville will stop bothering you. Or at least, he stopped bothering me! Maybe he got offended I kept teleporting around the hall.

The other minigames are all pretty easy to understand and challenging enough to not be boring, but I wonder if I would have been able to beat some of them as a kid. For instance, one of the early puzzles is figuring out the criteria to search up info on the library computer for finding aliens in disguise, and first you must get the password from the librarian. Susan easily gets that from her, but next comes the criteria itself. The kids will tell you “I have to find the four words that, in combination, correlate the most to aliens.” Okay, so.. I create a four-word sentence that relates to aliens? So like.. Alien UFO Sighting Roswell? Some other combination? Nope. You wanna know the answer? Eye Wand Two Believe. How in the heck was I supposed to get that? Trial and error? I had to consult the tips and hints document included with the game for the answer. That’s not good! Most answers are cleverly hinted at, like a teacher requesting mothball schnitzel from the lunch lady, or any of the teachers saying they’re averse to water. But that’s an early game puzzle that could only be solved through logic that I daresay borders on the lunar, if you get my meaning.

My problems don’t quite end there. To find out the identity of the alien, you have to test the teachers by combining items to use on them, whether it’s splashing water on them, disrupting their live translators, or whatever it may be. This isn’t new to point-and-click adventures, but what’s annoying is, you have to get on that website I mentioned earlier, find your test method, then ask the webmaster what items you need. Then you get the items, and they combine automatically. You can’t just figure it out for yourself, even if you have played the game before and know where the items all are beforehand. It’s obnoxious. I can understand, however, that excluding the “combine” function would eliminate guesswork for the kids who would be playing the game, but I mean, the test methods are laid out(quite creatively, I might add) for you if you can find your way to the website. Outside of that, I feel like experimentation shouldn’t be a problem. But don’t think I hate this game just because I have my qualms. Valid though they may be, the fun and quality of the game outweigh the negativity. Back to the fun!

This game excels at establishing tone. Remember in school, when you had to go to the office for a call from your mom, and as you walked around the empty halls, with nothing but your echoing footsteps, you got that sinking feeling, like someone was watching? Or like you were the only one left around in the world? Wandering the halls of the game, you get that feeling. The gameplay lends itself to the tone as well, with the strict nature of the school schedule making you reconsider every move as time runs down. As you move through the school each period, an invisible clock ticks down, so you don’t know how much time you have before the period ends. I had plenty of times I was trying to get stuff done and got cut short by the blare of the intercom. And the adults, don’t get me started. They’re all dismissive of your characters. They’re sweet enough to Peter and Susan when they’re being good, but aside from one adult, none of them believe the kids about the aliens, even if you’re Susan with the squeaky clean reputation and outgoing personality and the alien raygun and the video thing that plays messages FROM THE ALIENS and the watch that changes your language on the fly. Do you get what I mean? They won’t believe you just because you’re a kid, no matter what you say. Anyone who’s been a kid before(and I think at least some of you probably have) knows what it’s like to be ignored or dismissed. It’s stifling and annoying, and if you persist too much you can get sent to boarding school! The nerve!! Let them get abducted, then!

The game also has fantastic sound design. I found myself plenty of times sitting there listening to the sounds of the kids around my character messing around and talking, or the low hum of the AC as I stood in the hall, or the droning noises of the alien spaceship. Even when nothing was going on, it was a feast of sound, without being overbearing by any means. So My Teacher is An Alien has several great ways of immersing you into its world.

Something I found insanely cool about the sound design is that the principal, Driscol, will get on the intercom often and ask for certain kids to report to places. Typical school stuff, right? You don’t even think about it at first. It must just be more good sound design. Until you realize he keeps requesting for kids to go to the gym… Weird. Why only the gym? Why all of them? And why do I hear kids yelling when I go through the gym to the locker rooms sometimes? Then you manage to enter the locker room with the kid of the right gender and BAM, you’re witnessing an abduction! All of those announcements are secretly telling you a kid is about to be abducted!! Fantastic design choice! When I realized that, my jaw hit the floor! That brings me right to my next topic, the mystery itself.

My Teacher is An Alien is a story about kids figuring out through smarts, teamwork and sheer willpower how to overcome a world-altering event that is truly above their individual strengths.. It should only make sense, then, that the world is unknown and the people are icy, even in an environment as familiar and welcoming as a school(depending on your experience with school, of course). Each little chunk you take out of the mystery, each little nugget of info you store in your brain, feels like a real step in figuring it out. Big things like finally nailing down which teacher is the alien of course feel cathartic, but even little things like hearing “I would rather live far far away from water” from a teacher, and then finding a thermos and realizing you can fill it with water, without any fanfare, made me feel like I’m really solving a mystery and staying under the cover of prying teacher eyes and strict school periods.

After getting my hands on the password with Susan and cracking the code to the alien blog(thanks, developers), I learned that one solid way of exposing an alien is to disrupt the live translator they wear on their wrist. The webmaster said to find a shortwave radio(which I got from Peter’s locker), a tuning fork and a magnet. Now it’s not all that hard to figure out where those other items might be, given that Mr. Daniels is the science teacher and Mr. Tucker is the music teacher, but my question came in how to get those items. Luckily, I managed to wander into Daniels’ room when he wasn't there, and the game let me look around! Let the serotonin commence! I snatched the magnet right up, then tried the same thing with Tucker’s room. You can keep track of where each teacher will be with the schedules in the office. In my first playthrough, I had gotten into a lose state by(assumedly) not figuring out the alien’s identity or from continuously losing kids to abductions that locked me out of getting anywhere past Wednesday. So in my second try, by the time day 3 rolled around, I was planning out my every move, worried that I would run out of time or that I might have done something wrong. In a good way! Good tension!

Through some sort of providence(or the fact that children were going missing and nobody was doing anything about it), a trendsetting journalist started appearing in the halls. When I talked to her with Susan, she seemed to actually have a grain of faith in her. The girls who get it, get it! Aliens melting your prefrontal cortex! But the journalist won’t fully commit to the beat right away. She won’t believe Susan at all if you are too earnest with her. I thought this part was interesting! You can’t just say “yes aliens are real I can show you to their spaceship” because the journalist will stop believing you, thinking it’s a prank. And you can’t show her too much blind trust yourself, either. It’s a fascinating choice that they added this “wrong dialogue choice screws you over” part because I never encountered something like this as a kid, unless you count Ace Attorney, but that was a little more into my tween years. I can imagine this would be a part of the game a lot of kids would have spoiled their save files at. All of the conversations thus far were more of just chances for you to gather information in each of the dialogue choices, whereas here, there are actual dialogue branches, and you have to have certain items or have encountered certain things in order to get access to the believable answers, and while I haven’t played through this too many times, I’m betting she wouldn’t fully believe you even if you made the perfect choices. I felt like I was playing a visual novel for a minute. You mean this is Chaos;head? Huh?

Finally, Thursday comes upon us. Here’s where stuff really starts hitting the fan. The alien communication device gets a new message. “Abduct Susan, Peter and Duncan immediately.” I definitely thought they’d save this for Friday, but they must be sick of their captives going free. You have exactly two periods, one a normal class and the next a mandatory assembly, to get what you need done, before kids IN YOUR GROUP start being targeted. One by one, each of the kids is abducted without any grace period, and you can’t avoid it by predicting which kid they’re gonna take, cuz they’ll just choose someone else. By the time end of day rolled around, my girl Susan was all alone, and the school had locked down in light of her friends’ kidnappings.

My heart was in my stomach. I was legit worried I had gotten a bad ending. After school, I wait till night time and try to contact the journalist lady in a last ditch attempt to get the other kids back. The game enters you into one last hard-to-navigate conversation with the news lady, although due to its shorter length I think this one was easier. Susan manages to convince her to turn up at the school, in her cunty red business outfit no less, before Susan drops the alien device in her hands, tells her to turn it on when she gets the signal, and to call the authorities as soon as she’s back. Then you finally meet the leader of the aliens in the control room of the spaceship and enter into an, admittedly, kind of anticlimactic stalling session while Susan tries to free her friends and teacher. But Susan was never one for action sequences anyway, was she? You manage to learn some info about why the aliens are taking kids, mess around with him a little, and then run off with your friends into the portal, where Duncan compliments Susan’s ability despite being a girl(har har har), and everyone laughs before a freeze frame as the MIB fly after the UFO.

All in all, fantastic game. I would have both adored and been deathly afraid of this game if I had played it as a kid. If you’ve got a way to play it *cough virtual machine cough*, I highly recommend it for a fun, slightly spooky, nostalgic time. I was delighted to find that the studio behind it, 7th Level, had also worked on several other pc games including a Spider-Man and a Monty Python game! So I’ll definitely be picking some of those up if they’ve got a comparable charm to this one!

If you read this far without skimming, what a trooper! Thanks so much for indulging me for a while! Check back next month and I"m sure I'll have something new to waffle about!