I recently started Thimbleweed Park and that’s pretty much where the game ended for me. I love adventure games, Monkey Island in particular holds a special place in my heart from when I was a kid. Getting drawn into the colourful characters, great writing and good atmosphere gave me hours of entertainment. Hours of entertainment is exactly what I knew I wouldn’t get out of Thimbleweed Park right from the off.
Thimbleweed Park is a point and click adventure of old fit with retro pixel art style, terrible repetitive music and the tried and tested using interface where all of your choices are in a box at the bottom of the screen and you have to pick the right option and then click on an item on the screen to progress. The term “tried and tested” flashed into my head for a second but just because something is “tried and tested” that doesn’t mean it works. It makes good sense to try something out before you use it but just because adventure games used to use it, mainly due to certain limitations, you’re not obliged to continue to use it.
This is the first flag that Thimbleweed Park is setting out for the nostalgia award and I’m all for that - nostalgia is a warm comfy blanket that you wrap yourself up in at night when you’re feeling vulnerable. Moments later however the you run into some cooky characters that then vomit some exposition about adventure games to you. Not in game exposition but actual factual real life adventure game exposition where Lucas Arts and Monkey Island get called out by name multiple times. “You don’t need to explain a dialogue tree to me game it’s adventure game 101, and you definitely don’t need to snatch away all pretence of embarrassment and failure by telling me no dialogue option is a dead end.” At this point Thimbleweed Park has pretty much lost everyone that isn’t it’s nostalgia crowd. For the nostalgia blinded adventure game lovers don’t want something that will challenge them like Day of the Tentacle or Maniac Mansion, all they want is the aesthetic and branding that causes their mind to fall out for a few hours, only for it to return not out of necessity or boredom but because you need rescuing from this toothless, practically insulting crap. You know how the rest of the game goes, I know and I didn’t even finish it: you spend 8 hours walking around a weird, quirky town reminiscent of Twin Peaks picking up objects for npcs that have told exactly what they need by name and exactly where you can get it, - draining what’s left of the challenge this game could offer - progressing from section to section and discovering secrets about various characters that you won’t have invested in despite the game thinking you obviously have.
There’s a smattering of playable characters, ala Maniac Mansion just to layer the nostalgia on thicker, and you can switch between them to have them interact, exchange sassy dialogue, or, like me, have them stand in separated parts of the game to help break up the monotony of the background that I have to look at every time I backtrack to help out weird npc #26. There’s the junior male detective who hates being talked down to, the less junior female detective that can’t be arsed with this shit from the moment she’s dumped there - there’s also a whole side plot about her having an ulterior motive that I’m sure will disappointedly pay off later on in the game but who really cares. A bad mouthed clown that always carries a balloon that has made his career through insulting his audience and has the unfortunately luck of insulting a gypsy who then proceeds to put a curse on him so he can never remove his make up. He’s pretty much a mix of Krusty the Klown and Pennywise with none of the humour of the former and none of the terrifying charm of the latter. Theres a wannabe game designer girl that initially scrapes just close enough to the line of author inserted proxy that you think it’s only a little self aware and then completely speeds passed the line proceeding to completely destroy any meta subtext this game my have - Christ, if Thimbleweed Park hacks off any more parts it’s in danger of becoming a low resolution walking simulator intertwined with tedious, purposefully obtuse “puzzles” OH WAIT. The last is the ghost-dad of the game designer girl with unresolved issues towards his daughter.
With everything taken into consideration, Thimbleweed Park is so by the numbers in terms of adventure games that it’s boiled all the charm, exploration and creativity down to a succession of “walk to place, insert plot device that is literally spelled out for you, walk to new place, repeat.” You don’t need to make your puzzles obtuse for the point of being obtuse, the reason all the puzzles in Monkey Island were fantastically, worryingly bizarre was because the design team was allowed unfettered access to the cocaine machine.
The designers for this also worked on other Lucas Arts games, which is apparent through an early crowd scene in the game where you can point out 4 or 5 Lucas Arts adventure game characters. This is an ego trip, that’s all. A way for the designers to flex their muscles producing things that are inferior to what they used to make, but that’s lost on the audience that want another “classic adventure game”. It was also Kickstarted and we all know the mix of proven game designers and way too much money way too fucking quick with a vague deadline never goes well. It tends to resemble anyone procrastinating while in the middle of a deep drug dive, regaining their lucidity just long enough to realise they have 2 weeks to finish that really important project they were assigned.
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