Thimbleweed Park

I despise the story like the one that Thimbleweed Park has. It completely ruined intriguing premise and rather interesting mechanics of switching between several characters to solve some situation. If not for some good puzzles, decent graphics, a lot of quality of life conveniences and some voice acting that doesn't suck it would be 1/5 for me just because of how very bad the story is. Forth wall breaking – "oh, we are inside the game, isn't it strange that the town of 80 has only 1 house and three characters look the same to save on voice actors? Aren't we clever to point it out aloud in the game? Yes we are!" – is incredibly trite, self-congratulatory, cringe cop out where writers cannot come up with writing anything actually good or intricate. The initial mystery is not even solved as in the last third of the game the focus shifts to the above-mentioned 4th-wall-breaking. This kind of scenario was done more or less graciously exactly once (in Monkey Island 2) and never since, yet developers still think they are being clever and novel with this approach. There is no sincerity in this story, no stakes, no weight, no good writing. The only character with any real development is Agent Ray, and only somewhat. Voice actor for sheriff-coroner-whoever is so terribly grating I turned VA off because this is an NPC you run most often into, especially early game. The rest of voices might be good but I'd never know because just a thought of running into this terrible character made me never turn VA back again. If not for the abysmal story, if the writers actually gave us an actual mystery to solve and good story to follow without trying to look smarter than they are, it would be a much better game, but any good puzzles or characters or situations are completely marred by the story it conveys. I regret the time wasted on it.

But too much running around

Awesome adventure, puzzles, fasinating caricoures, and a supriseing ending...

Overall a stellar game, a true gem of the point and click genre. The art is drawn a beautiful pixel retro style reminiscent of all of those 80s/90s games of your childhood but given a modern twist due to the fact it looks pretty good on a large monitor as well as a small 13" laptop. The puzzle design feels unlike most of the old Lucasarts games whereby they seem more logical and require a little bit of creativity to solve rather than walking around repeatedly trying to use (x) with (y) until something happens. I did, unfortunately, have to use some hints towards the end of the game as suddenly the difficulty seems to shift and ramp up allmost instantly to become very hard rather than obvious. One instance of this is a location that was previously non-accessible becomes accessible without any indication that something has changed for this to happen. The ending is a little bit of let down but so are alot of games in the genre but not enough for it to walk away with a negative feeling.

I love this kind of old school point and click adventure. It just scratches an itch you've had for a long time.