Thimbleweed Park

It's not that it is simply providing effective nostalgia, rather it is genuinely achieving all the things that made me love those classic adventures in the first place. It is also, to my sensibilities, beautiful and moody in a very satisfying way, and it feels mature... created with love and a wink of self-awareness by people who know this kind of game very, very well.

Finally a normal adventure point and click game. It's full of jokes, the old ones. I'm playing it each day, has an interesting story, funny characters. All what such a game needs. Thanks Ron for this!

So this is how you feel like when all of a sudden you imprison yourself into your own apartment, and have (almost) no contact whatsoever with the outside world just to be able to enjoy an adventure game created by the same guy(s) who created Maniac Mansion and the first two MI instalments. Being brought back to my teen years I can say I enjoyed the ride all along, all 25-ish hours it took me to finish the game in the 'normal' (meaning 'hard') mode. The ending was a bit bittersweet, in itself maybe not what I would define as a perfect ending, but -as the wise man always says- it's the journey that counts, not the destination, and boy, what a journey it was! All in all the puzzles were rightly balanced: a few very easy and a few at the opposite spectrum, luckily none of the try-everything-with-everything kind of crazy. The 5 main characters have all their own agendas that the player gets to know about as the game progresses; maybe there could have been more interactions among them, but again this is just me being nitpicky. And now to the trickier part: I was not among the original KS backers, because I learnt about the game when the funding was already completed. So I feel like it's my duty to do all I can to spread the word, write this joke of a review and make as many as possible aware about it. So buy it for yourself, and consider buying one more copy as a gift to anyone who might like it. It's the least I could do to have Ron Gilbert & co. consider starting a new project along the same lines of TWP.

Thimbleweed has it all and has it all in abundance. You like Lucas Arts titles? Classic 9 verb interfaces? Great writing and humour? GORGEOUS ART? Nostalgia? Buy it. Play it. Love it. Simple as that!

The creators of the legendary Monkey Island adventure games are back and decided to give us a new game that lives up to the memories that my generation has about these old games: Thimbleweed Park. In Thimbleweed Park you play five characters that have nothing in common but that at the same time are connected in ways they don’t know anything about. Even though the game begins as a murder mistery and with two Mulder & Sculley-like FBI agents that are supposed to solve a murder, the game game comes with all the weirdness and humor that you’d expect from a Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick game. Thimbleweed Park is a fun ride and it lives up to the expectations that someone who grew up with LucasArts games involuntarily has. If LucasArts games were still around and would still be making adventure games, Thimbleweed Park would carry their brand label. But even without any nostalgia, the game easily stands on its own and delivers great adventure game entertainment. A note to the younger generation: No, it’s not a 3D game, no, it does not have action sequences and the graphics are intentionally pixelated the way they are — if you play through the game, you will find that there even is a logical reason for the pixelated graphics embedded in the story itself. It’s not just about selling a nostalgic experience to old farts like myself, it’s actually a deliberate design choice to underline certain points of the story. It took me roughly twenty hours to play through the adventure, so at EUR 19,99, that’s about a buck per hour of game play — which is an excellent value and worth every single cent. Although there is an Xbox One version of the game, I bought it for the PC on GOG, because I simply cannot imagine playing a point & click adventure with a controller instead of a mouse. The hardware requirements are extremely modest, and even my eight years old Dell XPS M1530 Core2Duo machine could easily handle it. So my guesstimate is that Thimbleweed Park will run on almost any machine out there that’s still working. Android and iOS versions will come later, and I think I will buy a copy for Android just to support the developers in the hope that they will make another game like this soon. Just visit www.thimbleweedpark.com for purchase links, more background info and even an interesting developer blog.