Ben There, Dan That! / Time Gentlemen, Please!

Size Five Games, consisting of Dan Marshall and Ben Ward, have made three Ben and Dan games, but the third—the magnificent Lair of the Clockwork God—doesn’t quite qualify here for its excellent combination of PnC and platforming. But play it too. They’re all wonderful.

Being defiantly British in their humor many years before the arrival of Thank Goodness You’re Here, both games break almost every rule of what’s acceptable in a modern point-and-click adventure. Utterly verboten are LucasArts’ games references and self-aware jokes about being a game, and yet, they’re hilarious

Based loosely on the developers, the two protagonists make you immediately feel like you’re part of the in-jokes of their deep friendship, as they set off to try to fix the antenna on their TV so they can watch Magnum P.I. This, as you’d expect, causes them to become abducted by aliens, and travel to all manner of universes. That’s the first game, Ben There, Dan That! (the obnoxious exclamation point insisted upon), which was released in 2008 for free. It’s now bundled with Time Gentlemen, Please!, and the two games make a perfect pairing.

In TGP, the pair continue on from the previous adventure, accidentally killing everyone in the world by making them watch a Magnum P.I. marathon. So obviously it’s time for time travel to try to put this right, while also battling the efforts of their evil future selves, and accidentally giving Hitler access to dinosaurs. Yeah, that sort of stuff.

As “wacky” as it all sounds, it’s all extraordinarily funny, the writing piling excellent jokes on top of one another while spoofing the genre, itself, themselves, you, pretty much everything. They’re two of the funniest games you can hope to find.