Thimbleweed Park

I loved it , thanks a lot for this game !

I have been playing adventure games for three decades, including all the major titles created by Ron Gilbert. As such, I could not have skipped Thimbleweed Park, which I actively backed during its crowdfunding phase. I am also used to Gilbert's style of storytelling and his ability to create great memorable games from a silly narrative. But Thimbleweed Park is far from becoming a memorable or great game. It starts with an engaging and atmospheric story that leaves plenty of options to build a great adventure. Soon, several story arcs and questions start opening. But when the game is expected to get deeper and more interesting it is exactly when it starts falling apart. The story starts losing cohesion and no effort is made to create meaningful relationships between the characters. As a result, the game premise and narrative become secondary, and the player is left with nothing but a sequence of random puzzles to solve. As the game reaches its ending, the initial premise, the story, and all questions that the player faced during the whole game are simply left open. I am aware that silly and/or disappointing game endings are a kind of Ron Gilbert's trademark, as recently demonstrated again in the “The Return to Monkey Island". But TP's ending is just lazy and manages to ruin the whole premise. In my case, this is a game that I will not play again because the quality of the puzzles is far from being sufficient to compensate for the disappointing narrative. Anyway, Thimbleweed Park should be tried by all point-and-click adventure game lovers because of its graphics and design. But if you are new to adventure games then look elsewhere and pick a game with a satisfying narrative.

I liked the idea of these old-timers re-releasing a game. And there's a good amount of humor in the game. The game starts off really well... But quite quickly you've seen everything and it's just running around the same places. Then the number of interactions with new NPCs ramps down towards the end of the game. And I found the actual ending to be REALLY disappointing. It's like they ran out of budget and just used development sketches as padding. Doesn't leave you with a satisfied feeling.

Thimbleweed Park goes off the rails a bit near the end but it’s still a good game and has a lot of positives. The game has a great setting in the town; great characters; great dialogue; and great humour. The puzzles are a bit of a mixed bag. One thing the game didn’t do was make me go around trying random objects together in order to see what works which I applaud. The puzzles at least follow logic and reason, usually. Some were better than others but none made me filled with rage which a lot of games in this genre do. I do wish that you could have moved the characters as a group as sometimes moving all four to the same location takes more time than it would if you could do so. I also wish that I didn’t have to click “use” every time to open a door and could just click on the door. I also wish I could skip the audio of dialogues because sometimes if I accidentally clicked on a person I would have to hear things I had already heard and it was annoying. The map being able to fast travel was a god send. The game also does a good job of having their to do lists is you have a good idea of what you have to do although they could have done a better job giving hints as to where certain things were. There is an in game hint system where you can call a number in game for hints. I thought this was a fantastic idea but found the few times I used it that the hints didn’t help at all. Still the game did a fantastic job of recreating tropes from old school adventure games. What I mean in my original statement about the game going off the rails is that I didn’t like where the plot went in the last bit of the game. I wasn’t overly happy with many of the resolutions of the characters or with the general direction the story took. It made sense given the clues, I just wasn’t a huge fan I guess. The graphics of the game are what they are. As far as pixel games go things at least looked distinct and could be told apart. The voice acting was well done.

It's a good game, no doubt about that. It has a charming humor, the good nostalgia flair, the right amount of meta-humor and fourth-wall-breaking and the puzzles are mostly well done. Of course, your mileage may vary, it depends on how much you enjoy such humor. Personally, I found it a little bit on the short side for that price (under 10 hours for me), which is what makes me give it 4 stars instead of 5. A few hours more gameplay or a few bucks less would have made the mixture perfect. But if you enjoyed the old Lucasarts adventures, you will very likely enjoy this game, too.