Thimbleweed Park

A point-and-click adventure by Ron Gilbert, the creator of Maniac Mansion and Monkey Island. Although the graphics are more polished, it does try to emulate the old style SCUMM engine with the text based interface, where you perform actions such as: click PICK UP/LOOK AT/USE/PUSH/PULL then the object you want to interact with.

You initially control two detectives that are investigating a murder. They give me a Mulder and Scully vibe, but these detectives have never worked together before. Later on in the game, you do get to control more characters. Part of the game is delivered in flash-backs where you play as these individual characters to flesh out their backstories.

Obviously, there’s going to be puzzles where you need certain characters, or where they need to team up in order to progress. You switch by the icons at the top right of the screen. Each person has their own inventory, so you need to use the Give command to pass over items.

Left click selects or instructs your character to move, and you can hold down the button to cover longer distances. Right-click performs a default-action (so right-clicking a door opens it; sadly, I discovered this hours into the game), Tab highlights hot-spots, and middle mouse wheel click skips dialogue.

You can easily feel lost since the main town area has a main street, and two side-streets, and it is hard to remember what building is where. Many shops in town are boarded up, so you are forced to walk longer distances to get to points of interest.

Additionally, you often don’t have to do much in each area, so it feels like you are walking for a long time to barely do many actions. I put it in the “hard” mode too which was supposed to have more puzzles. I’d imagine the feeling is worse in “easy” mode.

When you progress through the game, you can go to several areas outside the main town. You get a map at this point which allows you to quick travel. You can quick travel to different streets within the town area, but still have to walk to the actual shop, so you still need to remember what shop is on which street.

If you are stuck, then there is an in-game walkthrough in the form of a game helpline. So you need to pick up a phone and dial the correct number. This is a nod to the old days where there were phone lines to get walkthroughs rather than looking information up on the internet.

The game is structured in several chapters where you have a main aim. However, you have loads of sub-objectives which are listed in each character’s notebook, but most of these you cannot actually complete in that particular chapter. This makes it difficult to understand what you need to do next.

Since there are so many places to go to, it is easy to overlook picking up an object. There were plenty of times where I had to use the helpline to tell me that I’d missed an object. In a similar fashion, there are buildings/areas that are inaccessible until you reach a certain chapter; but you aren’t told they are now accessible.

One small “puzzle” that really annoyed me was this. I needed 5 cents to use the photocopier but had no idea where to get this coin. I called the helpline and it did say you can hand in an empty bottle at the shop. I went to the shop, didn’t see any indications on the signs. I walked in, still couldn’t see any indications. I talk to the employee; he doesn’t mention it. I hand over the bottle anyway, he moves out of the way, and I see the sign behind where he originally stood. Why put a sign in the background and allow characters to obscure it?

I’ve seen some reviews say the ending is absolutely brilliant, and others say it is absolute trash. I think I’ll side with the latter because it does seem a complete cop-out. It’s in the same category as “it was all a dream”. You know each character has their secret motivation for their actions, but in the end there’s no real resolution (well, it’s a cheap one), and it seems the murder was quite irrelevant.

Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick took us back to the golden age of SCUMM graphic adventures with "Thimbleweed Park". The game is littered with easter eggs and references to "Maniac Mansion", and despite the thirty-year gap, there's hardly been any technical innovation. The game is as clunky as its predecessors, but it also shares the same wacky tongue-in-cheek humor and crazy puzzles that made LucasArts adventures unique.

The gameplay dynamics are essentially the same as "Maniac Mansion": the player can switch between multiple characters and pass items over to solve puzzles and access locations that are sometimes restricted to a particular character. It all starts as some kind of "X Files" and "Twin Peaks" parody, but as the plot unfolds, fourth wall breaking becomes increasingly intrusive until it starts to feel like a whole different game. The direction they took in the late chapters is indeed compelling, but I have to say that this time I was looking forward to just solving cases and busting suspects in a more traditional way. It's also weird that unrelated characters suddenly start to collaborate without an apparent reason. A couple of dialogues in between would have definitely solved the problem, though.

It's just not very funny. Might just be that I'm older, but this fourth wall breaking shtick doesn't land as well as it used to. I would have preferred to see Thimbleweed Park lean more into the weird and mysterious side of the town.