Thimbleweed Park™

From the crowdfunding get-go, Thimbleweed Park's design team promised to recreate the look and feel of old-school computer gaming. They absolutely succeed, but not solely through the genre, pixelated graphics, or verb menu UI. The writing captures the essence and heart of the Lucas Arts era. It begins a touch bland, but the wacky world widens rapidly, and by the third hour I was warped to the mid-90s in my friend's basement at 2AM of a Saturday night sleepover, guzzling Surge and giggling through Day of the Tentacle. The creators (featuring some old titans of the field) clearly understand the draws and snags of the genre, and intentionally recreate both. Yes, even the snags; there's an almost literal pixel-hunting achievement challenge throughout, and it's as easy as ever to get stuck and resort to item combination spamming. Despite being a nearly perfect recreation of early 90s adventure gaming, it is, like most of those games its emulating, far from perfect. The early and late chapters are weaker than the middle. The endgame is rushed and incomplete, as if the team ran out of Kickstarter funds. Various areas, puzzles, and NPCs scream of aborted plans for greater importance. The game has the mind-boggling option of an easy mode. But what tiny target demographic are they expecting to play a mode that just removes a large percentage of the puzzles when the plot is catered to and the Kickstarter was funded by old-school adventure diehards. The plot is interesting, but messy, and unexplained and incomplete threads abound. But none of these problems are particularly important because the games is funny, the puzzles are strong and fair, and anyone who has a soft spot for what they're trying to do is going to be more than willing to forgive the weaknesses.

90's LucasArts point and clicks are some of my favorite games of all time. This definitely reminds me of the formula that made those so successful. This is an excellent game with great voice acting.

What a beautiful game. Best Ron Gilbert ever, and that says it all. The old school graphics made me hesitant - and I'm still not convinced that moder graphics would not have made the game even better. But who cares? The scenario is fantastic. The humor is fantastic. The gemaplay is fantastic. If you love adventure games and beautiful stories, you want to play this game.

One of my favourite games of all time. I've replayed it a lot. Love the characters, the setting, the art, the humour. Amazing. Would live in Thimbleweed Park if I could. I've owned this on GOG for years. But wanted to buy it on Steam just so I could leave a review. 10/10 The signals? Very strong tonight.

33/33 achievements. The atmosphere of this game is great, it's really like the perfect ye-olde-adventure-game, but modern. The town you get to explore is huge, and filled with items. You get to control 5 different characters (a throwback to Maniac Mansion and Day of the Tentacle). And that's where it gets a little bit too complicated. I've played the game on hard and I found some puzzles really obtuse. In the end I just looked up a bunch of hints. It's really annoying that I figured out the solution for a lot of them, but I wasn't at the right place in the story yet to fully complete it. Some of my solutions were better (charge a battery with a ghost's zap ability instead of another electrified object… ok that sounds really weird when I type it out). Playing the game on casual the second time was must faster, because entire sections just don't need to be done. One feature I really miss, that was actually in Day of the Tentacle, is being able to swap items with different characters by just giving the item to a character portrait. Now you have to go meet up with the two characters in order to hand over items. This gets annoying fast in the hotel, where the elevator moves in real time between 13 different floors. Of course there are achievements where you have to do a repetitive action multiple times. You have to listen to 100 (different?) voicemails, pick up 75 specks of dust, read 100 books, visit all 10 floors of the hotel, read all 17 newspapers and make all 5 characters cry. And finally, would it be a Ron Gilbert game without a meta ending?

YEEES!