Tramboi
Prophet
However, I'll say this: Ron Gilbert needs to make a spinoff game where you play as Ransome (and only Ransome). I'd d1p thatshit*bleep*.
Play Dropsy instead.
However, I'll say this: Ron Gilbert needs to make a spinoff game where you play as Ransome (and only Ransome). I'd d1p thatshit*bleep*.
Also, Franklin
I spent hours trying to get Franklin outside the hotel, because I thought a few puzzles in the outside world required him to. And they strongly hint that you can do that, with that crystal in the penthouse you can interact with and Virgil even giving you a clue !
In the end, you can do nothing. It's a dead end. Why ? What's the purpose of setting up an entire puzzle and not having a way to resolve it ? Was this rushed ?
Thimbleweed Park Review
They really don’t make 'em like this anymore, folks. Get 'em while you can.
Posted: 04/20/17 | Category: Review | Developer: Terrible Toybox/ Ron Gilbert/ Gary Winnick | Publisher: Terrible Toybox/ Ron Gilbert/ Gary Winnick | Platform: Mac, Ios, Linux, Xbox one, Windows, Android
Genre: Point-and-Click Adventure
Release date: March 30-31, 2017
The graphic adventure game is roughly 30 years old. It was in the late '80s that Sierra On-Line started producing simple graphics to accompany the otherwise standard text adventure that ran under them.
About this time, Ron Gilbert was designing the first Monkey Island, and Sierra and LucasArts (with Gilbert) were about to dominate the gaming world in the coming decade. Then things got weird, and mostly (IMHO) less fun.
In their new game Thimbleweed Park, Gilbert and Gary Winnick have managed to incorporate most of that rollicking history — the glories as well as the bumps in the road. Thimbleweed Park is a modern adventure, financed (by 17,000 loyal fans) on Kickstarter. Very modern.
It employs a mock (or modified) SCUMM build-a-sentence engine for its game control. Very old. It starts off with mostly modern game puzzle design, which is to say you’re mostly told where you can’t and where you should go. Very modern. By the end game, however, the player is largely thrown back on his and her wits to make it through some of the gnarlier puzzles to come down the adventure pike in recent years. Very, very old.
In short, Thimbleweed Park is itself a sort of ersatz museum of the adventure game. It also spends a lot of time commenting on adventure games, and gets ultra meta by its conclusion. One wonders what an adventure newbie would make of it. But, of course, Thimbleweed Park was produced primarily to please its thousands of Kickstarter contributors, who undoubtedly are mostly old hands at adventuring.
The best thing I can say about Thimbleweed Park is that it’s the first new adventure game to provide me with an “Aha” moment in about ten years. Virtually every adventure now follows what I call the Telltale style, which is to limit the player’s motions and choices to reduce the chances of getting stuck.
Unfortunately, this also essentially eliminates most of the adventuring. If you can’t get stuck, it ain’t an adventure. It’s just an animated picture book. I’d gotten so rusty, in fact, that I almost couldn’t believe it when I came across a tricky puzzle in Thimbleweed Park, so accustomed had I become to having my hand held and to moving through games as though half asleep, just waiting for the game engine to pop up and tell me exactly where to go and what to do.
The story? You’re wondering about the story. Well, it gets complicated. It starts off with a couple of feds blowing into this podunk town to investigate the strange murder of a German national (nice inclusion for the many German AG fans!). But the story mutates several times before you arrive at the end, and I wouldn’t want to spoil too much of the wackiness here. The game’s story, while interesting, is really just another of the many things that come under the sardonic fire and twisted manipulation of the game’s authors.
You start out, however, playing as both (or alternately) Agent Reyes and Agent Ray, though they compete more than cooperate with each other. Later, you get to play as three more player-characters: Ransome the Insult Clown, Delores the game-programmer niece of the town’s poohbah Chuck, and Delores’ nebbish father Franklin. By the end of the game you can switch among all five of these characters.
In 1987, Gilbert and Winnick produced the first SCUMM game, Maniac Mansion. In it, you chose two of a bunch of available characters to play throughout the game. Each character has somewhat different skills and much of Maniac Mansion is mixing and matching until you find a pairing you can actually get through the game with. In Park, there is some cooperation between the many playable characters, but not much. However, each of the five characters has a distinct personality and his or her own agenda (some of them secret).
In my Preview, I stated that the game’s voice acting is superb, that the writing is clever and funny, and that the graphics, though paying homage to a game made at the time of Park’s action (1987), are really quite good and entertaining in their own right. I will mention now that the music and sounds of the game are pleasant and expert. The theme song will no doubt rattle pleasantly around your head for a week or so.
Ron Gilbert announced that he was going to make a game that hearkened back to the gameplay of the LucasArts heyday, and he mostly has. No doubt, there’s no going completely back. Some things have changed forever. But here is the obvious question: is Thimbleweed Park on a par with the classics of the Nineties? Sometimes. It is just about as funny as the Monkey Island games. It is just as well-written and just as imaginative. And some of the gameplay is as engaging and even as challenging.
But you probably couldn’t release a game like The Secret of Monkey Island now. Too many players would get too frustrated and just abandon it. Gilbert and Winnick wisely (no doubt) saved the toughest parts of Park for the last few sections where, of course, the more diehard players will be less likely to throw in the towel.
Of course, there’s a lot in Thimbleweed Park that is like modern adventures. Holding down the mouse to make the character run will likely be your favorite, as there’s a lot of real estate in the game, especially before the map turns up. As I explained in my preview of the game a few weeks ago, the graphic engine is only faux-SCUMM. It’s really a very sophisticated (so far as I’m able to tell) modern engine. One that allows for one of the few interesting “side-games.”
I was playing for hours and scratching my head about a certain picking-up-specks-of-dust thing. Is this part of the actual game, I’m thinking? Am I going to need these things? And then it dawned on me that this was one of those add-ons for, mostly, Steam players. You collect all specks of dust and then brag about it to your friends online. Luckily for me, I managed to play a version of Park, (I’m not going to abbreviate the game's title as TP for obvious reasons) uncoupled from any shell application, whether Steam’s or GOG’s. Hallelujah for that!
However, because Park employs different “planes” that shift against each other as you move about, it allows the designers to “hide” the specks behind the outer pane(s), so that you only see the speck during a short span as you travel across the screen. Clever. That said, I still don’t like cosmetic side quests. But perhaps you do, and this is one of the more challenging ones.
I should mention that Thimbleweed Park does have two modes of play, Story mode and Adventure (or “Hard”) mode. It’s an option I wish every modern adventure offered. One mode for those players who simply want a good story with no mental challenges, and another mode for those puzzle-fiends such as myself who really relish a good challenge. I didn’t play the “story” mode of Park. Frankly, I have no interest in or use for it, except to be glad that it’s there to appease the hordes of puzzle-phobic players.
Still, I do have a couple of gripes about Park. First, it starts out as a rather interesting X-Files-ish murder mystery. People are getting zapped and made to disappear by some mysterious dark presence. Also, some of the folks in town (mostly played by the same characters) seem to be in on the conspiracy. But the game eventually morphs into something completely different and we never do, satisfactorily, find out what happened early-on in the game. We can infer, but we never get the straight answer.
By the end of the game, when things have gotten really twisted, you may no longer care. But I’m an old mystery buff, too, so I notice stuff like that. Also, I think the game gets a bit too “meta” by the end. It may even "outclever" itself. As a result, I found the conclusion of the game less than satisfying. In fact, the end borders on the psychotic. Or, at least, the nihilistic.
Also, there are a lot of red herrings in the game. Many of them are boldly announced as red herrings. Many aren’t. A good adventure, of course, needs red herrings. If everything were crucial, there’d be no mystery. But too many red herrings spoils the broth and Park may have dumped one or two too many into the manic mix.
Mostly, however, I have praise for the game. Gilbert has largely done what he promised, to produce a classic-style adventure that makes the player think and even sweat a little. Veteran adventure gamers will probably enjoy Park a lot more than newbies, but I suspect the newer players will simply gloss over the many retro references.
The game ran smoothly on my laptop, which is almost old enough to play the last Monkey Island without an emulator. And I ended the game needing one more measly, goldarn speck of dust! Oh well. They really don’t make ‘em like this anymore, folks. Get ‘em while you can.
Grade: A
(find out more about our grading system)
+ Great writing
+ Very funny
+ Often challenging
+ Terrific voice acting
- Kind of a downer ending
- Story elements left unresolved
- A few too many red herrings
ThimbleWeed Park: Seven Things They Got Right and Five That Went Wrong
No game is perfect, but I enjoyed the time I spent on Thimbleweed Park. Give it a shot, and you won’t be disappointed.
Posted: 04/21/17 | Category: | Platform:
Thimbleweed Park is the latest game from Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick, two creators of classic adventure games including Monkey Island and Maniac Mansion. My colleague Greg Collins is doing a full review, but I want to take some time to highlight a few items that the game got right, and a few that didn’t turn out as I'd hoped. This article is primarily spoiler-free, but you may want to play the game before diving in.
Seven Things Done Right
Here is a list of seven things that I think the game does really well:
1) Music: The highlight of Thimbleweed Park is the music. Whoever did the soundtrack deserves an award for it. (Editor's note: that would be Steve Kirk). Usually, when I pause a game to go fold laundry or refill a cup of water, I mute the computer. With Thimbleweed Park, I found myself turning it up. The soundtrack is a joy to listen to and perfected the mood of the game.
2) Length: Thimbleweed Park is one of the longest adventure games I’ve played in ages. It took me more than 15 hours to complete and I was never left bored, stuck, or confused. Even with 15 hours, I only have 70% of the Steam Achievements and haven’t even tried the casual mode yet. This game provides a lot of bang for the buck.
3) Graphics: Under normal circumstances, I am sick of the retro-pixel art approach to adventure games. These games often look horrible on my big monitor and this detracts from the gameplay rather than adding to the nostalgia. Thimbleweed Park avoids this trap. It uses a similar graphical pixel approach, but the game does not feel like a retro game. The resolution fills my screen without stretching. The streets of the town are long and sprawling instead of short and stunted. The animations make the characters come alive. The game is a beauty to look at.
4) It has an ending: This game has an ending. You don’t have to worry about walking out into an amusement park only to be left confused and then later discover that the game creator left the company and won’t be finishing his story.
5) Puzzles: The puzzles in this game are cleverly designed. There is no moon logic that we love to find in adventure games. You won’t need to collect specks of dust so you can create a cotton swab so you can get some ear wax which you use to make a candle to light your way through the dark cave. There is none of that. The puzzles fit well into the narrative.
6) Verb Interface: Instead of using today’s standard single mouse cursor interface, the game takes up some screen real estate to add some action verbs akin to the old LucasArts games. I was worried that this would add extra clutter to the UI and that it would be a pain to use. Games such as The Book of Unwritten Tales have spoiled me in their simplicity.
For the most part, this doesn’t matter. When your mouse rolls over an item with which you can interact, one button-click looks at it and the other button picks a secondary default interaction with the item. In 90% of the cases, this wil get you through the game. But don’t let your guard down,as in the other 10% you’ll have to choose one of the verbs to interact with an item in a third way.
7) What Do I Do Next? Some adventure games leave you confused as to what where you’re supposed to go next, and what you’re supposed to do. Thimbleweed Park has managed to avoid that trap. Each character keeps his/her own list of tasks, and the game automatically updates the task so you know what’s done and what remains. If you are stuck with one character, you can easily jump to another and work on that character's tasks until you figure out the sticking point.
Five Things It Does Wrong
Unfortunately, no game is perfect, and here are some of the things that could have used some improvement.
1) Character Arcs: You play as five separate characters throughout the game. I love the way they roll out the new character introductions and start them in with the gameplay. Unfortunately, a lot of the questions about the character motivations and backstory are never resolved. Instead, they are replaced with a completely different plot thread near the end of the game. I was a bit bummed about this method of handling the mysteries that draw you in.
2. Character Collaboration: The five characters have no reason to start working together. You force it to happen because you control them and can start sharing items between characters, something important for many puzzles. But this collaboration has no logical start in the game. Additionally, since we need to share items between characters, it is difficult to do so. Both characters need to be standing next to each other to make it work. Day of the Tentacle had a great mechanism for exchanging items between players. you could drop the item onto the user’s icon. Unfortunately, Thimbleweed Park neglects this feature. While realistic, it does not alleviate the frustration of having to run across town to get an item you think you may need from another character.
3) Humor: The humor in the game comes from ridiculing the Adventure genre or referencing past LucasArts games. While I enjoyed it in the beginning, it started to wear on me. They push the one-trick pony way too far. I can laugh at the occasional, “If this were a Sierra Game, I’d be dead already” comment and chuckle at Ron Gilbert’s book about how to create a trilogy in two parts. Overall, I feel there is too much reliance on breaking the fourth wall and regurgitating the same old joke in a new form. This will be great for old-school gamers who adventured in the 80s and 90s, but any newbies will miss most of the humor.
4) Multiple Endings: The original Kickstarter campaign promised meaningful multiple endings. This is technically true, but all endings I found have minor variations on the same theme. It’s like saying my day is different because I put on my shoes after walking downstairs instead of before. Sure, that is a variation to my morning routine, but it is inconsequential.
There's no inducement to replay the game in order to reach a different ending the way there might be for a Telltale game, or even something such as King’s Quest 6.
5) Dialog Skip: I gave credit to the Verb Interface in the previous section as one of the things they did right, but the user interface is far from perfect. Taking a cue from the new King’s Quest game, they did not include a way to skip dialog. Words cannot express how annoying this is. I just read the text on the screen, why do I have to wait for the person to finish talking before I can continue playing the game? Especially when I’m stuck and have already heard this line a dozen times before. I am shocked that the game got this far without providing this basic feature. Do game developers actually play adventure games anymore?
No game is perfect, but I enjoyed the time I spent on Thimbleweed Park. Give it a shot, and you won’t be disappointed.
To be fair, point and click adventure games are probably the least likely game to be bought after watching streams. I mean if you've watched an LP of a PnC through to the very end you really haven't missed much with exception of course to the few adventure games with some variation in them eg: Blade Runner, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Conquest of the Longbow, et cetera.Ron Gilbert is butthurt that people watch others playing games but they don't buy the games themselves:
I get what he's saying. I know a bunch of people that would actually say stuff like, "Yeah, I played King's Quest V.... well, I watched a let's play...." and I wanted to boot them in the skull. Sad fact of the matter is games do have to sell in order to make more, so yeah, it'd be nice if people who watched let's plays bought games. I think a lot do, though. There's always going to be people that don't, and just watch let's plays. I can't fault a developer for wanting people to buy their games.
Bt
Yeah, everyone knows Telltale's games aren't really games!
Bt
Oh and anyone entered the kitchen right at the end of the game? Made me laugh a bit.
Oh and anyone entered the kitchen right at the end of the game? Made me laugh a bit.
I didn't, what was there? :D
Oh and anyone entered the kitchen right at the end of the game? Made me laugh a bit.
I didn't, what was there? :D
A possible lawsuit by Disney.
Question about the game (possible plotholes?):
So did the bum kill the german guy in the intro or what? Who knocked Reyes out? Also what HeatEXTEND said. The hell's going on with those plot holes?