Thimbleweed Park

If you are going to make an old-school adventure game it is important to still learn from the past. Having an open world is great but having what are obviously puzzles that you can't solve yet without the game giving a lead on what is next does not make for a fun experience. Combine this with the sometimes illogical aspect of the game (using radioactive substance for something it wouldn't actually work for or going through a dialogue tree to enter a number you already know) and (in my opinion) uninteresting characters and un-funny jokes and you end up with a tedious experience. LucasArts without the funniness and cleverness but with more of the frustrating illogical puzzles.

I finally quit playing this game after I could not longer convince myself that it was an enjoyable experience. It is overwhelmingly dreary. The environments are mostly ugly (a corpse in a ditch, sewers, an alley, a run down downtown). The characters are mostly cynical, miserable or hateful people (with the exception of Delores). Is Ransome supposed to be funny?!? He's unbearable! If Agent Ray is bored and just wants to get the investigation over with, why should I care? Most of the humor is annoying and tedious. Hearing "a-reno" over and over again isn't clever, it's obnoxious. This game is like The Secret of Monkey Islands' evil twin. Where Monkey Island is charming, it is cynical. Where Monkey Island has interesting locations, it has ugly ones. Where Monkey Island has winsome, sympathetic characters you root for, this one has mean ones you just want to go away. Where Monkey Island has an interesting plot, in this one it is like... why should I care? Where Monkey Island is funny this... isn't.

The game is pretty good, but I've found a nasty bug involving a puzzle with a rat, a hole and a piece of cheese (if you leave the cheese on the floor and then pick it up again before leaving the room, the hole becomes inactive and you can't interact with it anymore, thus making the game unfinishable). Right now I'm not personally in the mood to replay the whole game from the beginning, but this particular bug aside it's definitely worth a try.

This is surely the most disturbing gaming experience I've had in a decade. The game is not bugged, the game is not bad, the game is just too old ! At the beginning I was excited playing an old style game recently developed, but wow... this is boring, frustrating and not fun ! And the most disturbing is that... it is exactly what these kind of games were decades ago, so I can't complain about the game itself. The only thing I can complain is that it is not the kind of fun I find in recent games and clearly... this game style is not fun anymore to me. It is linear as it was decades ago, I can stay during several days on the same problem to solve if I'm not using the phone to get hints (thanks for this option, I used it more than I can count) and while back in the days we had much less games to play to and it was much more difficult to get one, why would anyone play this kind of games today while you can instantly have much more fun playing to a free-to-play game ? This is old, too old. But the game is not bad, not bugged, and it is clearly the kind of games we had during the early 90's. So I can't put less than 3 stars but neither can I put more.

First of all, some context. Although I've played many PC games in my youth that were, for want of a better word, point and click games (games from Humongous Entertainment such as putt putt being main examples) I have never played Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, Maniac Mansion or any of the other classic point and click games of the era. Therefore I came into this game with perhaps a more objective mindset than many others and while I'm happy this game has satisfied so many with nostalgia for the past, this is a deeply flawed game that is unlikely to win over many modern gamers to the charms of the genre, which is a shame, because I think there's a lot of potential here. The major problem is the writing, which simply isn't as funny as it thinks it is. This game isn't being made for children, it's being made for nostalgic adults who've had twenty years of clever post modern writing in games and other media (The Paper Mario games for example, or Deadpool) and may want something more intelligent than this. The plot is full of major holes and the characters are very two dimensional, only Ransome the Clown, who feels like he's wandered in from a much funnier game than this, has an interesting personality, and while I won't spoil the ending of the game here is it a spoiler to say that the game simply doesn't get around to telling you who actually commited the murder you're ostensibly trying to solve? Because that's the sort of thing I'd have liked to know before I spent $20 on this. As for the puzzles, perhaps it's because I played the game in casual mode but I think at least half the items I picked up didn't end up doing anything by the end of the game, and frankly, if you want to bring new players into the genre, you shouldn't lock them into a half finished version of the game with missing puzzles just because they weren't game to attempt the so called 'expert mode' This was a real disappointment, and I won't buy anything from this developer in future. Avoid it.