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

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http://www.pcgamer.com/two-hours-wi...nture-game-from-the-creator-of-monkey-island/

Two hours with Thimbleweed Park, the new adventure game from the creator of Monkey Island
A brutal murder brings two FBI agents to Thimbleweed Park, a strange town filled with secrets.

It starts, as these things often do, with a body. A man is lying face-down in the mud under a bridge, and FBI agents Angela Ray and Antonio Reyes are investigating. At the bottom of the screen is a classic nine-verb interface—the kind used in games like Monkey Island and Day of the Tentacle—and I use it to examine the body. Ray notes that it’s already starting to pixelate; an example of the game’s dry self-referential humour. He’s approximately 40 years old, has been in the water for 24 hours, and I find a keycard for a hotel room in his pocket, but no ID. There’s also a small hole in the back of his head.

It isn’t much to go on, but my next step is walking to the nearby town of Thimbleweed Park to see if anyone knows anything about the victim or how he ended up dead under a railway trestle. I can switch freely between the two agents at any time and swap inventory items, which factors into some cleverly designed puzzles down the line. Ray is a sharp, sarcastic veteran agent who wishes she was anywhere else, and Reyes is her more easygoing counterpart. But subtle clues in their dialogue and journals suggest they’re hiding something—both from the player and each other. Just minutes in, the game’s already filled with intriguing mysteries I’m eager to solve.

I walk along the highway towards the town. On the way I meet two sisters dressed as pigeons, babbling about how “the signals are strong tonight.” Creeped out, Ray wonders if she should save the game, but the sisters reassure her that there’s no death or dead-ends in Thimbleweed Park, and that fail states like these actually make adventure games less enjoyable. See what I mean about it being self-referential? It takes a sledgehammer to the fourth wall at every opportunity, and it’s genuinely funny. “If this was a Sierra On-Line graphic adventure I’d probably be dead by now.” Reyes says later.

Thimbleweed Park might have been nice once, but now the streets are lined with abandoned buildings. It’s a grim, dilapidated place, and as I pass the boarded-up remains of a LaserDisc store I get the feeling that time has left it behind. Like all good adventure games, there’s an enormous amount of dialogue, and I spend at least an hour walking around the town inspecting and using verbs on everything I can. I visit the diner, eat a hot dog, and vomit in the alley outside. I meet the pigeon sisters again, who are actually plumbers and trying desperately to repair a broken fire hydrant (yes, it's a puzzle). And I walk to the top of a hill and see a sweeping view of the county the town is in, which will be explorable in the finished game, but is sadly locked off in my demo build.

I’m impressed by how atmospheric the game is, particularly how neon signs, crackling fires, and street lamps cast appropriately coloured light over the pixelated characters. Foreground objects and parallax scrolling combine to give the world a nice sense of depth, and I love how the artists have used reflections, animated scenery, and the aforementioned lighting system to give the retro visuals a modern sparkle. It’s clearly an homage to the golden era of LucasArts adventures, but it doesn’t feel like a cynical throwback or lazy nostalgia grab. These are some very fine pixels indeed, and the use of light, shadow, and perspective in the backgrounds is beautifully done.

Ray and Reyes meet with the local sheriff, who has a peculiar habit of adding “a-reno” to the end of almost every word. Informing him that we’re here to solve a murder (or “murder-a-reno”), he introduces us to three supercomputers that will help us solve the case. This is the first big multi-part puzzle the game throws at you, but I won’t say any more for the sake of spoilers. Yet according to co-creator Ron Gilbert, the murder isn’t the most important thing in the game. “Thimbleweed Park (for better or worse) is a big game,” he wrote on the game’s development blog last year. “And it’s not only big, but it's a complex story that weaves around, pretending to be one thing, then veers off in an unexpected direction just when you think you've figured it out.”

So it seems like the dead body is really just a catalyst for a number of different stories, and I wouldn’t be surprised if its importance faded into the background as the story develops. Especially when you consider that the agents are only two of five very different playable characters, each with their own unique motivations and personalities. Among these is Ransome, a mean-spirited, foul-mouthed clown who’s cursed never to leave his circus or remove his make-up. Delores, a talented computer programmer who dreams of working for MmucasFlem (see what they did there?) as an adventure game designer. And Franklin, the ghost of a pillow salesman. It’s a curious ensemble, and I’m looking forward to seeing how their stories meet up.

There’s a lot more I could say about Thimbleweed Park, but I’m wary of spoiling too much before its release ("soon" says Gilbert). From what I’ve played so far, it’s a funny, charming, well-written, and well-designed point-and-click adventure with heaps of personality. The art is gorgeous, the characters are interesting, and the mysteries are compelling. If it can keep this level of quality up for the duration of the game, however long it is, it could be something very special indeed. And as an adventure game fan, the very fact that Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick are making another one is worth celebrating. I don’t know what secrets I’ll uncover in Thimbleweed Park, but as the game’s sinister tagline states, in a town like this, a dead body is the least of your problems.

https://www.pcgamesn.com/thimbleweed-park/thimbleweed-park-point-and-click

Thimbleweed Park is a 1980s point-and-click wearing rose-tinted glasses

There’s the HUD, inviting you to pick things up, open them, use them, combine them. And there’s the pixel-perfect environmental artwork, pulling you into the game world more than an ostensibly low-fi collection of dots has any business doing. Scroll to the left or right and you’ll find bombastic denizens of a larger-than-life community, all aching for a chat. That’s Thimbleweed Park - classic adventure gaming as you fondly remember it, and with the less desirable elements of the reality as it was in 1987 filtered out.

It wasn’t just the load times, the weird trackball mice, or that lingering paranoia that something might happen to the floppy disk you kept saves on. Though Thimbleweed Park is instantly recognisable as the offspring of the classic Lucasarts adventures of yore, it happily embraces the subsequent thirty years of technical advancements and hides them under its bonnet. What you play is infinitely more user-friendly than Maniac Mansion and Day of the Tentacle, in ways that wouldn’t be evident unless you went back and played those games in situ.

Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick, themselves veterans of the ‘80s development scene and seminal figures in graphic adventures, are back to tell a new tale, set in the old days (1987 specifically), in the old ways. Thimbleweed Park is a town past its heyday, home to an eccentric community whose population just decresed by one. It’s that cadaver, face down under a bridge, that brings agents Ray and Reyes to town, and that’s where you and your left mouse button come in.

Coroner.jpg


Ray and Reyes are swappable at any time, along with several other characters you’re introduced to and given control of as the game progresses. Narratively that means you learn about the town from both an outsider’s and an insider’s perspective; mechanically it opens the door to more involved puzzling. That’s demonstrated neatly in a rudimentary early game puzzle that tasks you with photographing the cadaver for your case. Each player-character’s inventory is available to the other via that time-honoured ‘give’ command, so it’s worth keeping an eye on who’s carrying what.

On paper, it might also make puzzles that bit more daunting to the easily perturbed, since so many more variables are introduced, but Gilbert assures me that being able to switch characters actually avoids the player getting stuck. If you hit a wall with Ray, you can always progress in a different direction with Reyes or another cast member for a while. You may even accidentally further someone else’s cause.

Difficulty is an area Gilbert, Winnick and their team have obviously spent some time thinking about. Gamers in 2017 have different expectations - and attention spans - than their 1987 counterparts, so there’s a balance to be found when summoning some of the old magic for a new, or at least older and smartphone-addicted, audience. To that end there’s the option to play in normal or casual mode, the differences coming in puzzle complexity and frequency. It’s also an incentive to replay the game after the first playthrough on casual, if you didn’t back yourself to slay the puzzles initially.

ThimbleScreen10.jpg


My experiences of the early-game puzzles were logical and enjoyable, though I suspect there’s much of the Machiavellian LucasArts brain-teasing to come later on. In roughly an hour spent in Thimbleweed Park I didn’t have to resort to the old ‘combine everything with everything’ fallback. Which was a relief, given that Ron Gilbert was sitting right next to me. What I did do, though, was laugh a lot. I don’t remember the last time I belly-laughed at a game for reasons other than hilarious glitch/clipping problems, but such is the easy way of Thimbleweed Park’s dialogue. The Pigeon Brothers, two girls in bird costumes who become increasingly fixated with ‘strong signals’ as you speak to them more, were the first to summon a giggle.

The bizarrely upbeat vacuum tube store till girl was the next. Then the convenience store employee who had late ‘80s California surfer/stoner culture flowing through his veins. And pretty much everyone else, come to think of it. And that’s what will bring me back to Thimbleweed Park at release: the characters. The same hook that’s always worked for me in adventure games, even though I’ve never had the kind of mind that can unpick the logic puzzles and item combinations without doing a little cry. Thimbleweed Park’s got the level of characterisation you only really get when genre-defining industry vets get together.

ThimbleScreen13.jpg


There’s another layer of characterisation to each scene, though: that of the self-referential. Early on I spot a single white pixel lying on the road and pick it up. There it sits in my inventory, a dust spec that suggests a game-wide trawl for its fellows in the name of tongue-in-cheek pixel-crawling puzzles for the older fans. Similarly, Company names like Mucus Flemm come up, along with fourth wall-breaking dialogue in which Ray might ask whether she should save her game, initiating a lengthy exchange with one of the Pigeon Brothers about the merits of forgiving adventure game design.

The cumulative effect of all that on me was an overwhelming charm. Quite what someone who hadn’t played Day of the Tentacle, or even The Cave, before would make of it all is anyone’s guess. But when Thimbleweed Park releases - “soon” according to Gilbert - the genre veterans will have to work really hard to find something to grumble about here.
 

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Because San Francisco ?

edit : *sigh* ... backed ... but remember ...
20-bucks.jpg

That picture really needed to have an "*" at the end of the sentence, and then, in tiny writing at the bottom of the poster, 'plus inflation':)

Actually, when did that come out? Anyone feel up for doing the year by year inflation calculations (I'm sure there's "convert money from X year to Y year" calculators on the internet, but failing that, just get the inflation chart and go year by year)? Would be curious to see what the equivalent price would be today. I'm guessing around $35.
https://fineleatherjackets.net/monkeyinflation
 

Outlander

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Divinity: Original Sin Wasteland 2 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
That picture really needed to have an "*" at the end of the sentence, and then, in tiny writing at the bottom of the poster, 'plus inflation':)

I'm not sure either Ron, Dave or Tim expected Secrets to still be relevant almost 30 years after release :shittydog:

But yeah, it fits the 4th wall-breaking humor very well.
 

Wirdschowerdn

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https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/art...himbleweed-park-crowd-funding-and-funny-bones

Ron Gilbert Talks ‘Thimbleweed Park’, Crowd Funding and Funny Bones

Mike Diver
Feb 11 2017, 7:00pm
Only a real tuna-head wouldn’t bet on Gilbert’s new adventure living up to classics like 'Maniac Mansion' and 'Monkey Island.'
Ron Gilbert has been making video games for over 30 years. His big break, Maniac Mansion—which the Oregon native wrote, designed and directed—was released in 1987 by Lucasfilm Games, and almost single-handedly took the graphic adventure genre from niche concern amongst an endless sea of shooters and platformers to something close to a gaming phenomenon, one point and click at a time.

After Maniac Mansion, Gilbert worked on The Secret of Monkey Island and its sequel; Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure; and Zak McKraken and the Alien Mindbenders, before leaving Lucasfilm Games—later renamed LucasArts—to pursue new challenges. While he came back to graphic adventures in 2009, providing valuable guidance to Telltale Games for its Tales of Monkey Island series, it's really with this year's Thimbleweed Park that Gilbert's reconnecting with the games that he first made, which in turn made him, reputation wise.

Which is to say: this is an adventure quite out of time with 2017's gaming landscape.

"The point of this project was very much to build a game that was evocative of how you remember the old adventure titles," Gilbert tells me, moments after I've seen a decent slice of Thimbleweed Park in meticulous, mystery-unpicking action, all "Pick up" this and "Look at" that. "We've used pixel art less as a retro thing, and more because we just love it. That aside, we've not really limited ourselves in what we could do, making this game. I have no list of dos and don'ts that we followed. We just went with what felt right."

1486740866500-Coroner.png

All Thimbleweed Park screenshots courtesy of Terrible Toybox.

Thimbleweed Park follows the fortunes of five very different characters, caught up in strange events unfolding in the small, rundown town that gives the game its name, and its surrounding county. There are a couple of FBI agents who don't get along, Ray and Reyes, who have to begrudgingly work with each other and the local law enforcement tuna-heads. There's a foul-mouthed clown by the name of Ransome who refuses to take off his makeup. And then there's a game developer by the name of Delores and her father, Franklin, who's a little less than alive these days.

"These days" being 1987, the year of Maniac Mansion's release—and that's just one of multiple references to Gilbert's past, and adventure gaming's history beyond his credits, spread throughout what is quite clearly a love letter to the genre.

Which isn't to say Thimbleweed Park's exclusively for those people, like me, who played their share of point-and-click adventures in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It looks archaic—deliberately, but quite beautifully so—but it's fully voice-acted, and mercifully arrives shorn of those most-infuriating puzzles that tripped up so many in the Monkey Island days.

"I want to expose all of the great things about point and click adventures to a new audience." — Ron Gilbert

If you were there, you'll know what I'm talking about: the seemingly arbitrary combining of Item A with This Thing B over That Place C, in the hope of causing Supporting Character D to slip onto his arse and bring about Game Progressing Event E. Did I lose you, in the middle of that? You, and thousands of other players, back when.

"I want to expose all of the great things about point and click adventures to a new audience," Gilbertsays. "I think younger players get caught up in a little bit of nostalgia when they hear about the Nintendo era, the point and click era, the mystique of these games. It's interesting to them, but when they go back and actually play those games, they realize how crude they were.

"So, Thimbleweed is about letting them relive and understand what those games were, but through a game that has all of the stupid stuff removed from it. It's challenging, but without the confusion. We give you all the pieces you need to solve any puzzle in this game, and nothing is too obtuse. We specifically removed all that. Everything is logical."

1486741014415-Bookstore.png


Play testing has helped—we've come a long way from the once-through quality assurance of the first Monkey Island. Thimbleweed Park, Gilbert explains, has been tested some 30 times, with the small team at Terrible Toybox—Gilbert plus Maniac Mansion co-designer Gary Winnick, alongside a handful of others—closely monitoring where people got stuck, where they became frustrated, and seeing what they could do to make the experience easier to understand, while still testing the grey matter.

"We got to see the player's gears turning in their heads," Gilbert says. "Back in the day, we wouldn't give you enough clues. This time, we've been able to refine the game so that it best respects the player, while not making anything too simple."

Thimbleweed Park does feature a puzzles-pulled-back "Casual" mode, but Gilbert and coder Jenn Sandercock explain that even newcomers to adventures like this should play on "Normal" first, to better understand how all of the components in cracking its murder case—which is ostensibly why the agents are in town, at least—connect. After that, a second playthrough on Casual will deliver the story without quite so much running about finding finger print paper, non-rechargeable batteries, a pair of hilariously large wax lips, that sort of thing.

"There are some things in the game that a larger publisher would have probably stood in the way of." — Ron Gilbert

And it's a funny story, too—I'd place its chuckles-per-hour count somewhere just above Jazzpunk, although you'll want to adjust that depending on your adventure game experience and likelihood of getting the more in-joke-y one-liners and items to pick up. (Such as… what's this? An empty can of tuna heads?)

"There's a real dearth of humor in games out there, today," Gilbert says. "I don't really know why that it. I mean, there are some funny games around. Most of those get their humor from slapstick, whereas a game like The Secret of Monkey Island had a more sophisticated humor about it. The laughs came from the dialogue, the interactions with other people. I think the last game that really made me laugh out loud was The Stanley Parable."

One quality that Thimbleweed Park and The Stanley Parable share, besides being capable of tickling a rib or two, is that they're both the products of very small, closely-knit teams. Sandercock talks about putting jokes into an area of the game without any interference from anyone else on the team: "Ron hadn't been there for a while, came into it and just said, 'Yep, that's Jenn.' To have that kind of freedom and individuality in a game, that's nurtured by having a small team, it really helps."

1486741036189-HotelRoom.png


And while games full of attractive idiosyncrasies can and do emerge from big studios backed by bigger publishers, Gilbert is in no doubt that had Thimbleweed Park gone down that avenue of financing, rather than receive its green light through a successful Kickstarter campaign in late 2014, it'd have seen some of its more unique content removed.

"I don't want to spoil anything, but there are some things in the game that I know a larger publisher would have probably stood in the way of," he explains. "The game takes some weird detours, that are not a part of the main path, that perhaps a publisher would have shut down. The argument would be that it wouldn't be worth spending time and money on what was essentially just a joke at the end of the day.

"But a lot of publishers are good, don't get me wrong. A good publisher will be there to pull you back when you're about to derail. They're look over your shoulder and keep you honest. They'll question your decisions, and not in a bad way. They're making sure that everything has been properly thought through. I think that's where a lot of Kickstarters run into problems, because people don't have the experience to really self-censor, and self-regulate."

Not that Thimbleweed Park's crowdfunding campaign, even when it arrived with someone with Gilbert's reputation behind it, was a totally pleasant experience.

"The thing I didn't think about, ahead of launching the Kickstarter, is that people can remove their money." — Ron Gilbert

"It was white-knuckle terror for the full 30 days," Gilbert recalls, with a smile that's still partially formed from relief. "We funded the game on the fourth day, which was relatively quick. But the thing I didn't think about, ahead of launching the Kickstarter, is that people can remove their money. And I remember the first time I saw that. I was scrolling down the list of pledges and, boom, $25 subtracted. And we had a couple of $10,000 pledges, so I was thinking: what if that's some kid who's stolen his parents' credit card. So you're worried—what happens if people do start taking their money back?"

As it happened, they didn't. Thimbleweed Park made a total of $626,000 on Kickstarter. Which sounds a lot, but to Gilbert and team it didn't represent anything close to a "limitless" figure, with which he could relax and throw money at any problem that came along, with little concern for the bottom line.

"We have nearly unlimited memory, infinite storage, for games now," Gilbert says. "The original Maniac Mansion was 320k. It was two sides of a single-density floppy disc. And there was a lot of challenge in making that game, because we had a very limited amount of space. It was a constant struggle—we wanted two more rooms, but we couldn't have them. It got easier with Monkey Island, but we still had these very hard limits. Lucasfilm told me: 'You have five discs. That is the budget.'

"The thing that I don't have, today, is infinite money. Money, and time. So those become the limiting factors for Thimbleweed Park. We can have all of these different animations, but there comes a point where we have to have it all done, and we only have so much money to pay the animators, so we have to be careful that we don't run over on anything."

1486741144340-PostOffice.png


The game has run over—look on Kickstarter and you'll see that its release date was supposed to have been June 2016. As of right now, it's out "soon." Gilbert puts at least some of this delay down to his own slight mismanagement of the game's development.

"Even with 30 years of experience, I still got caught with stuff on this game," he explains. "The recording of the voices ran way late—I should have had that done four months before it was. If we'd had a publisher, they'd have been telling us to get into the studio and just get it done. It all worked out well in the end, but it was a scramble.

"I was late in getting a bunch of the writing into the game, and we couldn't record without that—but there was a lot keeping us busy, and I was just swamped. I started to cast the game, but was really unhappy with the quality of actor that we were getting, so I pushed that side of the game back, and back. And suddenly there's no time left, and this has to happen. Having a really good publisher probably would have solved that."

With over 15,000 backers to consider, not to mention the many thousands of expectant adventure game nostalgists and newcomers alike who didn't put their money down in advance, it's for the best that Thimbleweed Park didn't rush its way to completion, and that every detail was delivered to a standard expected of its much-experienced makers.

What I've played of the game thus far bears that out—it plays and looks like a classic adventure game of the early 1990s. It doesn't quite sound the same, and no doubt has a more self-referential wit to it, but if the objective was to produce a game that recalled the past without actually duplicating it verbatim, improving what didn't work so well before, it seems like a success.

Naturally, only playing the whole game will reveal exactly where Thimbleweed Park ranks amongst the adventure greats, if at all. But you'd have to be a real tuna-head to not want the best for it.


 

Wirdschowerdn

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http://adventuregamers.com/articles/view/32100

Thimbleweed Park hands-on preview
Written by Jack Allin — February 17, 2017

They say the more things change, the more they stay the same, and nowhere is that more true than in the adventure genre.

Way back in 1987, a couple dudes no one had ever heard of named Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick came up with a pioneering game called Maniac Mansion, which introduced multiple playable protagonists and a funky verb-based, point-and-click interface called SCUMM. Three decades later, a couple dudes everyone has now heard of are coming out with a retro-styled game called Thimbleweed Park, with a new set of multiple playable protagonists and a more refined but still-funky and essentially identical verb-based, point-and-click interface. As the game itself boasts, this is meant to be “the best adventure game you never played in 1987.”

Yes, Thimbleweed Park is Gilbert and Winnick’s answer to the hue and cry of old-school adventure gamers who miss the golden era of rich player interaction, expansive open-world environments to explore, overlapping objectives, unique characters to converse with, and a serious lack of hand-holding. Hotspot highlighter? Pshaw! Hint system? Who needs it! Single-click smart cursor? Puh-leeeze! That’s all for wimpy modern gamers who didn’t cut their teeth on the try-everything-on-everything (as a last resort) school of puzzle design and still fondly remember calls to help hotlines in the pre-walkthrough era. (And while I’m at it… get off my lawn!)


But wait a second, you may be thinking. Who wants to go back to hideously chunky pixels, rudimentary animation, and a rough-around-the-edges control scheme of an earlier millennium? Not to worry, as one of the developers’ other stated goals for Thimbleweed Park is not to give players the same experience they had back then, but the experience they remember having. (We recall most of the good stuff from the best games, and forget or excuse most of the bad, do we not?) There are still pixels in this game, sure, but man, are they beautiful here in all their high-resolution glory. Whether it’s the gradient colouring of a blue, pink, and orange-tinted sunset vista; the myriad little animations peppering each screen like feet splashing in water and stars twinkling in the night sky; or the sheer attention to detail packed into libraries, shops, and cemeteries, this is a great looking adventure. Normally this is where I say that Game X’s graphics likely won’t win over any ardent naysayers, but not this time. Thimbleweed Park may just convert its fair share of eye candy lovers.

The game (more or less) begins with a murder investigation, as two detectives arrive at the scene of the crime, unbeknownst to the other. According their personal journals, plucky Junior Special Agent Antonio Reyes and grizzled, snarky Senior Special Agent Angela Ray both have their own secret reasons for pursuing a case in the middle of nowhere, so they quickly split up. Surprisingly, you can’t have them interact with each other, except to exchange inventory, but you can usually switch back and forth between them as playable protagonists at will.



Anyone who develops carpal tunnel symptoms even thinking about the click-heavy SCUMM interface can rest assured that Thimbleweed Park isn’t without its user-friendly features. There are double-click and click-hold options to run, which is useful given the amount of scrolling terrain you’ll need to cover. While left-click performs most of the actions, the right mouse button is assigned to the most logical first action (highlighted in the verb list) for any given hotspot. Usually that’s simply “look”, but sometimes it’s a bit more impactful than that. But don’t think you can lazily right-click your way entirely through the game, as there will still be additional commands required in certain important instances. That’s where the verbs come in, and though there are a fair number of canned responses for non-matching actions, the added freedom to experiment with the generously high number of hotspots means there’s plenty to mess around with before even digging into the puzzles.

It’s a good thing, too, as the puzzles I encountered certainly weren’t gimmes. I acquired many items in my travels, some of which I never found a use for (and suspect I may never, though that remains to be seen), and others that demanded a fairly creative application. Where the difficulty comes in, though, is not simply the sheer volume of objects, but the enormous number of possibilities across a wide range of locations. In the middle of town I came across a wrench I figured I’d need, but failing to purloin it right away, I decided I’d come back to it later. A little while after, I stumbled upon a clue to the solution, but since there was still so much to explore, I kept going instead of circling back right away. And without a word of exaggeration, it was an hour later before I returned to the wrench. That wasn’t an hour filled with wasted padding either, but a busy 60 minutes crammed with all kinds of adventurey stuff.



Part of that time was spent playing two entirely different characters than the pair I initially started with. In questioning the townsfolk, twice I was thrust into flashback sequences of possible suspects. One had me playing Ransome the clown, a hard-swearing, Krusty lite-style circus performer complete with poofy red hair, ball nose, squeaky shoes and white makeup. The other had me playing a computer geek and videogame developer wannabe named Delores. Each had their own distinct areas, inventory, and puzzles, but even those proved to be remarkably extensive. Thank goodness each character has a handy to-do list tucked away in inventory.

All that may sound great, and it is, but I haven’t even gotten to the best part of Thimbleweed Park, which is its utterly unique sense of place. So many adventures treat their settings as generic, interchangeable backdrops, but there’s a reason this game was named after the geographically unspecified but vaguely southern (fictional) American town and its population of 81. (*BANG!* Make that 80.) It’s a seemingly normal rural town on the surface, but everything is just a little off. Local businesses are boarded up, the radios are all tuned to a conspiracy-themed station interrupted by frequent alerts, and technology is ruled by inventions from the beloved but recently-deceased Chuck. Need a fingerprint match? Run it through the talking FingerTron 3000 arcade-style cabinet. Got a blood sample to analyze? The BloodTron 3000 is your answer. You can’t even take down a culprit without first running the evidence through the ArrestTron 3000. (Hey, Chuck was an inventor, not a wordsmith.)



The local populace is just as wonderfully bizarre, from the “signal”-obsessed, bird-costumed plumbing sisters who call themselves the Pigeon Brothers to the eerily similar sheriff and coroner whose only obvious difference is their quirky tendency to finish words with “a-reno” or “a-hoo”, respectively. I wasn’t motivated so much by the whodunit nature of the murder case as I was by simply figuring out what the heck was going on with this strange town and its oddball inhabitants. The only thing overtly unreal is the curse put on Ransome by a vindictive voodoo lady, but just about everything has a slightly surreal vibe, and it won’t be long into your investigation before that starts to manifest itself into something more sinister.

Despite the ostensibly serious stakes and occasionally ominous tone, the trademark Gilbert humour is fully evident as well. Thimbleweed Park is laced with dry little quips that are genuinely funny, though I was less amused by the broader, fourth wall-breaking remarks. The first reference to the corpse starting to pixelate was worth a chuckle, but the novelty wore off before the jokes did. (But hey, I guess if we’re going old-school, some self-referential gags come with the territory.) All of it is delivered by a skillful voice cast, highlighted by the cantankerous Ransome and the hardened, cynical Agent Ray who’s never shy about voicing disdain for her unwanted partner. Some of the characters have names you might recognize, like Sandy and Dave, owners of the S&D Diner now serving fly-attracting, puke-inducing hotdogs. In fact, there are so many clever nudge-wink callbacks to Maniac Mansion, this game feels more like its spiritual successor than Day of the Tentacle ever did. (But shhh… don’t tell LucasArts.)



Okay, I haven’t even mentioned the fantastic music that transitions easily from southern-noir guitar to jaunty carnival tunes, but it’s time to wrap up, as this is starting to feel more like a full-fledged review than a first-look sneak peek. Then again, I spent more time playing through the Thimbleweed Park press demo than I have on many other complete games! You remember way back when adventures used to be LONG? So do Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick. I was told that the preview version represented about 15% of the full game, so I figured I could breeze through it quickly, only to discover four hours later just how wrong I was. I’ll let you do the math, but it’s clear that Thimbleweed Park is going to be a substantial game, the likes of which rarely come around anymore. You could cut down on play time by selecting the “casual” mode that makes some of the puzzles easier, but the “normal” setting is anything but a walk in the (figurative) park.

The full game is coming soon, and if the rest can match the stellar quality and quantity of the opening chapters when it releases, investigating Thimbleweed Park will be time very well spent, and a refreshing reminder that sometimes they still make ‘em like they used to.

:bounce:
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
https://www.kickstarter.com/project...new-classic-point-and-click-adv/posts/1817770

Release Date Locked In!!

Thank you for your massive patience as we pulled out our hair finalizing Thimbleweed Park.

3319e7a98e21186657466a9fcfc43061_original.png

We have now submitted Thimbleweed Park to the Xbox CERT system. What does that mean? It means that we’re finally confident enough to announce a release date for Thimbleweed Park.

So set your calendar reminders, make sure you’ve got your “I’m starting to feel sick” routines prepped for the day before release…

You’ll be able to play Thimbleweed Park on Thursday, March 30th!!!!!

Eh… what’s that you say? I backed this game over 2 years ago, you expect me to remember all the projects I’ve backed?! What’s it about now? What will I be able to play?

Here’s the short version:

In Thimbleweed Park, a dead body is the least of your problems. Switch between five playable characters to uncover the surreal secrets of this strange town in a modern mystery adventure game from the creators of Monkey Island and Maniac Mansion. The deeper you go, the weirder it gets.

More information is on our new, shiny Steam page. And you’ll notice we’re shipping with English voice, and subtitles in English, German, French, Spanish, Italian with Russian soon to follow.

PledgeManager Is Your Friend
Now that we’re going to release, there’s some boring formalities that will be coming your way soon to make sure you get the version you want and to get your reward.

We will be delivering rewards via PledgeManager. So if you haven’t gone to PledgeManager yet to check out your rewards, now’s the time. If you can’t find any emails from PledgeManager, go to:

https://terribletoybox.pledgemanager.com/projects/thimbleweed-park-ks/

If you can’t get in to your PledgeManager account and see Thimbleweed Park on it, go annoy Jenn by emailing support@terribletoybox.com

If you didn’t get any physical rewards, we will not collect your shipping address. So PledgeManager won’t let you enter that in.

If you did get physical rewards, we’ll be working on shipping them out to you a few months after the game has launched. Right before we actually ship we’ll send you a message via PledgeManager to double check that your shipping address is still up to date. Feel free to log in now and update it now if you have no moving plans in the foreseeable future.

I Want MORE Updates!
As we head towards launch you’re likely to get more updates that we’ve been doing previously from us via Kickstarter and PledgeManager. However, we’ll always give more news via the Blog and twitter and Facebook. So follow them if you want to know more about release and other sweet deals.

:kfc:
 

Blackthorne

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Codex 2014 Divinity: Original Sin 2
I really, really hope this game is well-received. What I've played of it was really cool, and I hope it injects some life into adventure games in general.


Bt
 

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