Thimbleweed Park

The beginning has a great hook of a murder mystery. The climate is drawing you in, the atmosphere is thick with conspiracy; you just know that there is something much deeper going on here, even the characters aren't telling you everything! You meet more characters, you start to get the hang of solving puzzles with cooperation, and pick up more threads of the plot. You start to "get" it! Unfortunately this is the highest point of the ride, the game peaks just halfway through and then goes downhill really fast. I cared for the characters, the conspiracy and the mystery; got served the the blandest, most pretentious "meta" ending imaginable and left with a bad taste in my mouth.

First of all, the game is for Maniac mansion fans, not LucasArts fans. Still The graphics are simple retro style, thankfully no one decided to go nuts on the artwork. The music is nice, but a bit monotonic after some time. The voice acting is simply cheap. The story is a semi-interesting mystery noir turning into an occult sci-fi. The ending is typical Ron Gilbert meta-bs. I still wonder if he genuinely thinks, that these are cool, or it's just his way of stating that the "journey is more important than the destination". There are no good endings to adventure games, only bad or worse. You start to feel an emptiness inside you after you finish it, OR you feel the emptiness and a bitter after taste, OR the emptiness, the aftertaste and the "What the *beepin* *beep* was this *beep*". Without a doubt, the guy has a knack for the latter. The game starts out well, easy logical puzzles, but after the prelude it becomes a 2 hours long walking simulator. That, and the "cute" jokes (they are certainly not funny), can easily deter the faint hearted players. But afterwards the puzzles get more complex and interesting. The clues are plenty, although sometimes some things are like 2 chapters early and by the time you get there, you forget them and of course you cannot revisit, so you either restart or watch a video of the earlier chapter. What's not cool, is the amount of red herrings in the game. What's even worse are the fake red herrings, the stuff that you actually have to do, but only 2 chapters from now, because it's logical, it makes sense, you are convinced that this is something you need to pursue, and it completely takes away your attention from what is needed to progress the game into the next chapter. Btw, the game is teeming with easter eggs, if you are into that stuff. Finally, after 25 years I understand what the *beep* a *beepin* monkey has to do with a waterfall. I don't know, maybe this is something trivial for native English speakers, it wasn't for me.

This is a great game. Overall its a must buy - even if you've never played adventure games. MUST BUY This literally feels like an adventure game from the 90's or maybe it feels like what those games felt like. PLUSES: - Great artwork; exceptional actually - great sound and voice work - excellent music - Great interface - Probably my highest praise is that the pacing is PERFECT. They stretched a lot of stuff with walking, dialogue, etc, but its done perfectly not to annoy. - Puzzle design is MOSTLY very logical and good - Lots of excellent fan-service, but not like ROGUE ONE. Everything was meaningful MINUES: - Sadly the ending is terrible - I actually hate the way they drew the characters. Big heads just don't work :( - Voice acting for Reyes is terrible. Poor character overall. Not sure why they had two identical characters

This game is a contemporary manierisic take of a genius maker on adventure games. It's the first and perhaps only postmodern adventure. If you seek an emotionally imbued narrative, go seek on the Wadjet Eye side.

As an aside: The "in-jokes" option seems wholly unnecessary to me (I say, "leave 'em in") but there's no real harm in having the option. This game has some good parts. Ransome the Clown was funny. It was great to play an old-fashioned point-and-click adventure with nice graphics. The opening location is terrific. A murder mystery should be a fun plot to solve but sadly, the game is ruined with a silly, terrible ending. I hope we can get better writing the in the future. I would love to continue supporting these games but not with such an ending.