Thimbleweed Park

The moment I saw Gilbert's and Winnick's names I knew what to expect from the game. I love adventures. Love oldschool style, pixel art and throwbacks to the good old past. I admit I hesitated a bit - but in the end, I bought it and chewed the game in two days. Graphics are something between Maniac Mansion and MI series - and trust me, it is not the only subtle easter egg to our oldschool favorites. Characters are memorable, very different and recognizable. What not to love? And of course, Ransom the *beeping* clown. Those *beeps* gave me a fair chunk of laughs! Go for this game if you love point-and-click adventures. Go for it if you love Maniac Mansion, Day of The Tentacle, Monkey Island series and/or Full Throttle. Go for it if you enjoy absurd humor mixed with overall weirdness. Then go and tell your friends about it and let the developers do what they love, which means making more great titles we all enjoy. Thanks for yet another great adventure, good sirs. We love you.

You all did SUCH a wonderful job!! I got stumped for the first time last night, just the way I got stumped with all the great old games. The puzzles, graphics, characters, dialogue, and story are great, and I think that Thimbleweed Park is a new masterpiece. Please consider doing another game. All your hard work paid off. I bought the game at like 9:05 a.m. when it went on sale, haha.

Well, Thimbleweed Park is not a bad game, but it's totally overhyped and more like a fangame than something that qualifies for a commercial release in the 21st century. There are lots of minor flaws but the main issue is that it thinks it's much funnier and better designed that it actually is. Indeed, it starts really terribly with one of the worst voice acting performances (the German homicide victim) in history followed by awful dialogs of the Mulder/Scully lookalikes with the Sheriff/Coroner/Hotel Manager (with all that "a-reno" and "a-boo"). This is worsened by the fact that you can't skip dialogs. While the minimalist walking animations somewhat resemble that of the very first LuscasArst adventures (Maniac Mansion/Zak McKracken) they are just ugly and don't fit the pseudo retro style. Plus the characters move much too fast most of the time, so it looks like they are not walking but teleporting. Then there's the issue that the game actually only pretends to be lores, so when your pixelated characters move away from you, their pixels become smaller which totally breaks the retro look. Regarding the puzzle design: admittedly, most of the puzzles are logical to some degree (apart from things like charging the battery which show the typical lack of scientific education) but there are two consistent flaws throughout the game. Firstly, some puzzle solutions simply don't work until a certain point in the story was reached. Secondly, some things only work with certain characters. This can be frustrating as its not always clear that a puzzle can't be solved yet or a different character is needed. Actually there are just too many characters and they wouldn't be needed if the designers hadn't limited certain actions or items to one specific character deliberately. Honestly, I also missed exciting locations (like in Zak McKracken), found the story to be somewhat bland and didn't like the ending. Well, and there are much too few save slots.

This feels like a combination of all MMucas Flem PnCs and I have waited 3 years to play this. I bought it to play it immediately, but did not have the energy since I wanted to replay Monkey Island and the other games instead of starting a new adventure. Which I kind of regret. I started playing this three years later and it felt just like "lol, are they really trying to do something that will be even close to the old 90s PnCs in greatness? This feels just like some lousy ripoff, please try something new". But after 10 minutes, it was more like "Ok, it's quite interesting after all. I may like this a bit". Then after an hour I was "Wow, this is really something". After 2 hours I felt confident within Ron Gilbert's hands, he did it again. Another masterpiece. I just finished the game and wow, what a plot! I'm very much impressed and my hat is off forever when it comes to Ron Gilbert future games.

Nice, nice, nice! A great classic adventure game for oldtimers like me ;-) If you love old school adventures this game is for you! Buy, buy, buy :-))