The sinister and mysterious aspects are quickly buried underneath a deluge of daft references and conversations that meander without doing very much to build the world, establish interesting characters or elaborate on the strong opening mystery. It's easy to forget, as all of these daft characters and situations pile up, that Thimbleweed begins with a corpse. And two of the first characters you meet, the sheriff and coroner, share a similar sprite and the same voice actor using a different comedy speech pattern for each. A pillow factory, it seems, is funny because pillows are funny and not the sort of thing that impresses anyone in the real world. The setting seemed muddled, with references to an all-powerful pillow factory magnate and ever-present vacuum tubes running everything from the crime-solving computers in the sheriff's offices to the telephones and fire hydrants.Ī town with a pillow factory as its most magnificent achievement, inspiring awe in the residents, falls dangerously close to precisely the kind of zany humour that makes me cringe. The writing, in those early stages, has to do a lot of work, introducing lots of characters (five of them playable, eventually) and fleshing out the backstory of the town. ![]() The first hour or two were equal parts a pleasant return to the comfort zone of point and click puzzling, and a sense that things were just a little too comfortable in Thimbleweed Park. On one of those fronts, Thimbleweed eventually finds a way to go above and beyond anything I expected from it, but the combination of broad jokes and mystery-thriller sometimes creates confusion and frustration in both the narrative and the puzzling along the road. Or, more accurately, like memories of the past it has handsome lighting and a level of visual detail that actually fills in the blanks that memory often papers over.Īttractive as it is, should such pixels please your eye, it's the quality of the story and the puzzles that really count. The game, which reunites Ron Gilbert with his Maniac Mansion co-designer Gary Winnick, is a point and click comedy-mystery that looks like a relic from the past. Did you notice how mysterious the ending was, and yet, how it didn’t make the game pointless? How it didn’t insult your intelligence by trying to be an artistic experience when all we wanted was a good adventure game? How it didn’t abuse the trust of the player in the author of the game? How it didn’t take advantage of adventure gamers’ well-known Stockholm syndrome? How it didn’t try to pull a meaningless, ‘clever’ twist ending in a gameworld that requires heavy suspension of disbelief to begin with? How it didn’t mock the player for working hard to look past obvious shortcomings of the medium? How it didn’t reinforce the image of the author as the master of bad endings, after that MI2 fiasco so many years ago? How it was a clear sign that the author brought his A-game to this work by not disrespecting the mystery and the player, and by not recycling crappy concept art? Man, that Ron Gilbert’s a real genius.In Thimbleweed Park, few things are what they appear to be. Wasn’t that game just great? Really took you back to the good old days. Repeat until Delores actually pushes the button. ![]()
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