Time Gentlemen, Please! (video game)

Time Gentlemen, Please! is a point-and-click adventure from Zombie Cow Studios, serving as the paid follow-up to the free game Ben There, Dan That!. It launched commercially on July 2, 2009, and was built with the Adventure Game Studio engine. The tone is darkly comic and occasionally surreal.

Plot

The plot picks up right after the first game. In Ben There, Dan That!, the duo Ben and Dan were tricked by their own future selves into thinking they’d been abducted by aliens, all part of a scheme to install them as rulers of a brainwashed world. In Time Gentlemen, Please!, the pair accidentally convince everyone to watch a Magnum, P.I. marathon, which wipes out the entire human population. To fix this, they decide to go back in time and stop the invention of the coathanger that started it all.

Using a time device left by their future selves, they travel through history over two weeks, but only make things worse. By 1945, Adolf Hitler rules the world with an army of anthropomorphic dinosaurs, thanks to the Golden Coathanger.

Hitler steals the time device, and Ben and Dan must navigate time paradoxes to defeat him and recover it. They eventually realize preventing the coathanger is a disaster, so they stop their earlier selves from inventing it—only to cause another paradox that erases the universe. God appears, resets everything, and the two end up back in their flat with the world restored.

The game is packed with references to classic adventure titles, like posters from Sam & Max and Full Throttle, and quotes from Monkey Island and Day of the Tentacle. Ben even calls Dan “the Glottis to my Manny!”. It also pokes fun at adventure game logic—Ben and Dan frequently break the fourth wall to note they don’t need certain inventory items.

Reception

Developed by Dan Marshall and Ben Ward, the game earned “favorable” reviews on Metacritic. Critics praised its humor and writing, though some found the scatological jokes and swearing not for everyone.

PC Zone called it one of the most outrageous games they’d ever played. IGN UK named it one of the best of 2009 so far in August 2009. A sequel, Lair of the Clockwork God, came out in 2020.