KickStarter Thimbleweed Park: A New Ron Gilbert Classic Point & Click Adventure

[imweasel]

Looks like a pretty decent game.

Too bad I have to sell my Kickstarter key on Ebay and get the 100% free GoG version from my pals.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

It's now in my Steam library. But I feel too giddy to launch it. I wanna procrastinate my first playthrough and keep it treasured for a special occassion, preferably when the end of the world approaches (2017?).

 

[Sam Ecorners]

About an hour in and it's good

 

[taxalot]

About 3 hours in and it's even better.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.kickstarter.com/project...new-classic-point-and-click-adv/posts/1845813

Launched! Release! Done! Finished! Shipped!

Thimbleweed Park has been set free.

Thimbleweed Park has been released into the wild.

Thimbleweed Park has been kicked out of the house told to get a job.

Choose your metaphor, but the fact remains that after a great Kickstarter, wonderful backers, and two years of development, you can now play Thimbleweed Park.

If you were a backer, log in to your PledgeManager account to get your keys (KEYS WILL NOT BE EMAILED OUT)

If you weren't a backer, you can buy Thimbleweed Park at these fine retailers...

Steam

GOG

Xbox

Mac App Store

 

[HoboForEternity]

yesssss. can't. wait. for. credit. card. statement.

 

[Great Deceiver]

I honestly think this game looks incredible and Gary Winnick Mark Ferrari is a fucking ace. Played the first hour and it's pretty cool, nothing incredible but very adequate and ten thousand miles beyond the wank that was Broken Age.

 

[Tigranes]

Holy shit, OK

My slow and nooby fray into the genre continues

 

[talan]

I honestly think this game looks incredible and Gary Winnick is a fucking ace. Played the first hour and it's pretty cool, nothing incredible but very adequate and ten thousand miles beyond the wank that was Broken Age.

They got Mark Ferrari to do the backgrounds.

 

[mibbles]

I'm about six hours in, in the middle of Part Three. Which difficulty setting are you guys playing on, how are you finding the puzzles? I'm on hard and it seems to have just the right amount of challenge. I enjoyed racking my brain in the spots where I got stuck.

I feel ridiculously happy.

 

[Darth Slaughter]

I played a little until reaching the town, and I'm really like what I see. It's like playing a genuine LucasArts game back in the 90's. One thing caught me by surprise is the amount of fourth wall breaking, and I still don't know what to think about it.

Also, the game is gorgeous. Beautiful and transitions are smooth.

Ron should make more adventures with his new engine.

 

[Blackthorne]

Yeah, I would love to make games using the engine they made for this. The parallax scrolling and the HD effects on pixel art are just so damn cool, from a dev. standpoint. I've played a little bit so far, and have been enjoying it much as I enjoyed games back in the early 90s, so I'm happy.


Bt

 

[bertram_tung]

I am on the mansion flashback with Delores. Still very early from what I can tell. The game is really great(so far). Couple of very minor design criticisms and voice-over nitpicks but it's nearly perfect (so far).


i was very surprised that one of my characters was captured and it seemed like it could have happened to any of them but I'm not sure. There might be genuine c&c in this game. Hard to tell with one early playthrough though

 

[MRY]

yesssss. can't. wait. for. credit. card. statement.

Do you want it for GOG or Steam? Your despair has moved my bitter heart to pity.

 

[bertram_tung]

The phone is actually a really fun diversion when you get stuck. It's fun to just randomly dial names and numbers and hear something totally random.

Looks like there are a few famous (at least related to lucasarts) names in there that have recorded messages, so far I have found Dave Grossman (Co-creator of Day of the Tentacle). I also found Tim Schafer and Ron Gilert himself but they didn't leave a voice message.

 

[HoboForEternity]

yesssss. can't. wait. for. credit. card. statement.

Do you want it for GOG or Steam? Your despair has moved my bitter heart to pity.

wow thanks. I'll have it on steam. You know my steam id

 

[Infinitron]

https://af.gog.com/news/ron_gilbert_interview?as=1649904300

RON GILBERT INTERVIEW: THE CREATOR OF MONKEY ISLAND AND MANIAC MANSION IS BACK IN TOWN!

As a point & click pioneer, it's only fitting that Ron Gilbert gets to be the one to bring them back the way we fondly remember them: as pixel-art, story-heavy affairs, riddled with compelling puzzles and humorous interactions. That was the idea behind Thimbleweed Park and that's what over 15.600 Kickstarter backers helped him create. As Gilbert himself keeps stressing, this is not an adventure game made exactly the way those classics were made, but one that plays like your memories of these games. There are all manners of modern bells and whistles built within its pixely exterior, and its design has also done away with the unnecessary frustrations of the past while preserving their old-school charm.

We recently spotted the legendary Grumpy Gamer standing outside Thimbleweed Park's city limits, wearing an "Ask Me About Thimbleweed Park" badge - It was hard to resist the urge. For those who want to know more, we're also having a Twitch stream where Memoriesin8bit and Flaose will [LOOK AT] the game and [USE] their questions on Ron Gilbert. Tune in tomorrow, Friday the 31st, at 8 PM UTC on Twitch.tv/gogcom.

In terms of design, is Thimbleweed Park more closely related to Maniac Mansion or Monkey Island?

Ron: A little of both. The character design is highly influenced by Maniac Mansion, and so is the room layout. But the puzzle design and dialogue borrow more from Monkey Island.

So why the SCUMM interface? Why not use one of the "smart cursor" interfaces that have come since?

Ron: That decision goes back to our goal of recapturing the charm of Maniac Mansion and Monkey Island, and I think the SCUMM verb interface has a lot to do with it. The other big thing is the pixel art. We all love pixel art, not for the nostalgia, but as an art form.

You're making Thimbleweed Park with a small team - most of whom are your past collaborators. You're coding, writing, and designing the game, but also managing the project. Is the experience similar to your LucasFilm days? Was it a conscious decision?

Ron: There are two reasons the team is so small. The first is our attempt to try and recapture the charm of the LucasFilm adventure games. Those were small teams, and small teams can work very differently than large teams -- more nimble, more opportunity for “improv”. The second reason comes down to resources, mostly money. Despite the success of the Kickstarter, we don’t have the money to support a large team. At the height of development, there were around 12 people working on the game.

You've expressed a fair amount of criticism for modern adventure games, but are there any positive lessons to be learned? Did any of those found their way into Thimbleweed?

Ron: I don’t think I’ve been too critical of modern adventure games, I really like some of them. Many modern adventure games – games like Firewatch, Gone Home, and Telltale’s games – are very narrative focused. Narrative is something I’ve always tried to do in my adventure games, but I want to interweave it well with the puzzles.

What do you want people to be saying about Thimbleweed Park five or ten years from now?

Ron: If they are saying anything about Thimbleweed Park 10 years from now, I’ll be happy.

You called this project's inception an experiment to see if you can recreate the charm of the old LucasFilm games. If it proves successful, will your next game be more or less in the same vein or something entirely different?

Ron: I don’t know the answer to that. I don’t tend to think about my next game until I’m done with the current one. If Thimbleweed Park is really successful, I’d love to build another point-and-click game, but I’d probably explore the design at a deeper level than we did for Thimbleweed Park. Do some risky ideas.

 

[Infinitron]

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-03-31-thimbleweed-park-review

Thimbleweed Park review
Welcome to Monkeyvale.

Thimbleweed Park is what would happen if you moved Nightvale into Monkey Island, and gave everyone too much rum.

Thimbleweed Park is a little bit afraid you won't love it.

In its worst moments, this point-and-click adventure from industry legends Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick, without putting too fine a point on it, can be insufferable. It doesn't so much wink at its audience as it does demand we fall into position, singing paeans to its cleverness. Even worse are the shots that Thimbleweed Park takes at old-school adventure games. Yes, everyone knows that the King's Quest series was obtuse, murderous, and frankly unplayable at times, but to have a character in your game gush about howlucky they are to be a protagonist in the hands of a certain other studio?

Eh.

But slowly, you realize that this is all just bluster, its swagger a way to deflect from its existential uncertainty. Make no mistake, Thimbleweed Park delivers on its Kickstarter promises. The tone, the artwork, the subtle callbacks, the five-character menagerie, the way they used modern technology to improve ever-so-slightly on nostalgia, all those variables are here in their Sunday's best, shoes polished and hair beautifully pomaded. I dug the hell out of fact Thimbleweed Park evokes some serious Nightvale vibes, marrying humor with existential dread. (You don't know what Nightvale is? Here, have a link. Come back after an episode.)

But it is smug, and it does take its jokes slightly too far. There's a sequence with a truculent clown where you stomp onto the stage to deliver insults by the pound. I understood that our vitriolic pierrot was intended to be an ass and Thimbleweed Park doesn't allow him to escape unscathed. Nonetheless, there's something frankly uncomfortable about staring at the options and thinking, "Do I rag on the kid in the wheelchair, or do I make the old woman cry?"

Luckily, and I say this with a gusty sigh of relief, it does get better. Thimbleweed Park relaxes after a while, and stops trying to prove itself. The pivotal moment for me was when a character discovered an out-of-order spiral staircase. Expecting some esoteric solution, I scurried about the dilapidated mansion, fruitlessly jamming items together, until at last, I thought, "Why not?"

And did A Thing.

And it worked.

When Thimbleweed Park works, it works beautifully. Like a Swiss-made watch or a production of Hamilton, every actor and cog sliding perfectly into place, aware of their place, their importance in the overarching narrative, and so very conscious of the genre's foibles and strengths. In that respect, Thimbleweed Park can, at times, feel peculiarly over-rehearsed, as though the jokes were built to an empirically proven formula. Which is not necessarily bad. Media is, by and large, a carefully structured experience, adhering to certain specific structures. (Example A: The Lester Dent Pulp Paper Master Fiction Plot) Nonetheless, I can't help but slightly miss the lunatic genius of inexperience.

I'm digressing.

What I love about Thimbleweed Park is its willingness to catapult players straight into the weird. It opens with an European-sounding man wandering down to the water, a reversible teddybear in grip, no explanation at all. Things escalate without the concept of brakes. The scene ends with him blue, bleeding, face-down in the water, and clearly dead because look, you can tell by the pixelation.

Fourth wall-breaking federal agents, who bear more than a passing resemblance to certain characters from The X-Files, then show up to investigate, at which point everything becomes even stranger. The two head down to the shambles of Thimbleweed Park, which once profited from the presence of an eccentric pillow magnate. There's also a clown, a game developer, a woman who works in a cake shop that once sold vacuum tubes, plumbers in pigeon suits, a coroner, a sheriff, and a hotel manager. (The last three are probably the same people. Probably. Don't trust those distinctive verbal tics.)

By and large, Thimbleweed Park succeeds in crafting a menagerie both humorous and sinister. The sheriff, for example, makes me think of Ned Flanders on the brink of a psychotic break. And the vacuum tube-saleswoman I found particularly unsettling, all smiles in her softly glowing dominion. But characters like the Pigeon Brothers, who are actually sisters with an inaccurately named van, only succeed in being grating, and the less said about that *bleeping* Ransome the *bleeping* clown, the *bleeping* better.

The puzzles, on the other hand, are more uniformly enjoyable. Gone are the ciphers that only be unlocked with the use of a rubber chicken. Thimbleweed Park roots itself in relatively rational conundrums, demanding only the smallest leaps of logic. Curiously, the game's at its weakest when it makes you juggle its characters. During cutscenes, they're all capable of banter, trading quips and verbal blows with all the elegance you'd expect of their creators. Outside of cutscenes? It is weird, I tell you, to have a federal agent hand her phone to a game developer, and even weirder for a clown to silently pass a bloodied wallet to a presumed law enforcer, all without fuss.

I won't even get into how eerie it is to have them all standing in the room, silently watching as you manoeuvre one of their ranks to a specific task.

(For the sake of posterity, I'd also like to note that the interface is pleasantly intuitive: accelerate your character -you often can swap between a few- by holding down the left mouse button; have your character use the most logical action by right-clicking on an object.)

Thimbleweed Park makes me think of that irascible uncle in a Hawaiian shirt, full of good intentions, but incapable of communicating save in fart jokes. I didn't know if I'd like the game. Real talk? I had to walk away from the game once, outraged by its attitude. But nostalgia - and the professional obligation to play - kept me coming back. Eventually, that sense of responsibility transmuted into genuine curiosity, and when the game surrendered self-aggrandisement, I learned to love it.

There's something endearing about a game that allows you to ask its characters, "Do you like adventure games?" over and over, as though it is stammering for validation. In an epoch of virtual reality and blockbuster graphics, Thimbleweed Park is genuinely a creature out of its time.

It works, though. All of it. And while the overture might be rough, the rest demands attention. Confectioned by the virtuosos of yesterday, Thimbleweed Park is surreal, silly and sinister.

Remember: the signals are strong tonight.

 

[Comte]

Just bought this on GOG completely missed the kickstarter.

 

[Astral Rag]

That looks so much better than the screenshots I'm seeing on Steam and GoG.

Is it possible to disable the transparency of the UI in the release version of the game?

 

[Berekän]

That looks so much better than the screenshots I'm seeing on Steam and GoG.

Is it possible to disable the transparency of the UI in the release version of the game?

Yes, there's a toggle in the options for that.

EDIT: I was mistaken, my eyes deceive me.

 

[Lord Rocket]

here is a pointless post about how I'm enjoying this game. However, the digs at Sierra seem a little cheap, given the last time Sierra released an adventure game was in, what, 1995 or something like that? Righto it's back to Matlock for me

 

[Darth Slaughter]

That looks so much better than the screenshots I'm seeing on Steam and GoG.

Is it possible to disable the transparency of the UI in the release version of the game?

You can change the font style and have almost that, but transparency is aways on.

New Style:

Old style:

 

[Astral Rag]

Well, that sucks. I hope they patch in a transparency slider or something.

 

[Darth Slaughter]

Well, that sucks. I hope they patch in a transparency slider or something.

the thing is that in cutscenes, the verbs disappear completelly, and the scene is fullscreen. But in any case, it's not that intrusive and somehow you can barely notice.