I felt genuine panic upon entering a dark bathroom and seeing what appeared to be the red eyes of the killer peering back at me. Despite the joke density (The Thimbleweed Park website promises a joke every two minutes), the game maintains a real sense of menace. The humor rarely felt forced or out of place. From the fourth wall-breaking dialog about the pixilation around the murder victim’s face, to the running gag about the Sheriff and the Mortician being the same person, the jokes are both frequent and well-integrated. “The main character is the town and you need to explore and understand the whole town.”Īs expected from a game designed by Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick, the game is pretty funny. Good adventure games are really about exploring the environment.” He’s put this idea to use in Thimbleweed Park by putting the town in in the spotlight. It’s very much about exploring that house. “Many people enjoy exploring a world, which I think is also the case with something like Gone Home. Gilbert hopes the game will appeal to the new generation of adventure gamers- the people who enjoyed Firewatch or Gone Home. “No spoilers, they start to go down this proverbial rabbit hole of weirdness, and strange characters, and what is really going on in this town, and why does nobody seem to really care about this body that’s out by the river.” This mystery extends to the playable characters as well: Ransome the Clown and Dolores are initially suspects in the case, and the two Agents appear to have an agenda independent of solving the murder. “What the agents discover as they get into town is that the dead body is the tip of the iceberg of the oddity that’s going on in this town,” said Gilbert. The murder mystery is just the hook to kick off the story. Players can opt to resolve any, all, or none of the characters’ plotlines, but the endings are not mutually exclusive you will be able to see all of the game’s content in a single playthrough. There’s a main ending, and each character has a separate ending that can be resolved after the main plot concludes. Gilbert assures us that multiple playthroughs are not required to experience the game’s multiple endings. “You kind of decide ‘I want to play most of the game with Ransome,’ or “I want to play most of the game with Dolores,’ but there are definitely points where each of the characters are needed to solve puzzles, and a lot of times they’re needed in groups.” Though you will need to use all five characters during the course of the game, he wants players to choose to primarily play with whichever of the five playable characters they choose. According to Gilbert, this is intentional. Unlike Maniac Mansion or the Cave, neither of the agents appeared to have special abilities that allowed them to uniquely solve puzzles. The two agents explored the town of Thimbleweed park, while the flashbacks teased the circus and mansion locations. In the preview I played as FBI Agents Ray and Reyes, as well as a brief playable flashback sequences starring cursed clown named Ransome and and an aspiring video game designer called Dolores. The retro design style of Thimbleweed Park is clearly a choice, not a limitation. I booted up my old copy of Maniac Mansion to compare, and the improvements are obvious. Thimbleweed Park gave the team tools like real-time lighting, multiple layers of parallax, and large locations- features that were impossible in the SCUMM engine that Gilbert used for his older games. According to Gilbert, “We wanted to build a game like you remember those old games, not necessarily how they actually were, but how you remember them.” He feels that players remember classic games through the filter of nostalgia. The game might look like it came from the 80s, but it’s built on the back of a brand new engine. I played the first 15% of the game and had a Skype chat with developer Ron Gilbert in anticipation of the game’s early 2017 release. Centering around a murder mystery in a quirky town, Thimbleweed Park features five playable characters and a sprawling play environment. Thimbleweed Park is a throwback point-and-click adventure game created by the pioneers of the graphic adventure genre: Ron Gilbert ( Maniac Mansion, The Secret of Monkey Island, The Cave) and Gary Winnick ( Maniac Mansion, Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders).
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