I've been playing Thimbleweed Park on Android recently. In general I do love point and click puzzle games but my feelings on this one are very mixed.
* The writing is hit or miss
* The story is just serviceable
* Only about 20% of the jokes land for me
* The constant 4th wall breaking is just bad
And then there's the puzzles. Maybe I made a mistake in selecting hard mode at the start but it's got the worst of the genre's "what the hell" moments... And it's really long. About halfway through I started using a guide and for the majority of the latter game puzzles, there's no logic to solving them so you'd have to resort to clicking everything and with 5 playable characters, about 40 things in my inventory (most of which can be given to other characters) by the end game and 30 or more locations, there's just too much.
I'm going to finish this - probably today actually, I'm right at the end - but I'm not finishing it by feeling excited for the second one.
By contrast I replayed the broken sword games last year and while they show their age and have plenty of what the hell moments, a big difference is that I cared about the story and characters while playing. George and Nico are funny, dumb, endearing. I don't feel that way about anything or anyone in Thimbleweed Park.
I played it when it was released and mostly enjoyed it, though I can't remember what difficulty setting I picked. I bought it mostly because I like Mark Ferrari's art, but ended up completing it. Some characters and jokes were intensely annoying, especially Ransome. I did like Delores, though.
Afterwards, I revisited some LucasArts games I'd played before (Monkey Island 1 and 2), and tried my hand with some I hadn't (Fate of Atlantis, Sam'n'Max, Full Throttle and also Flight of the Amazon Queen, which isn't from LucasArts). I think what you describe is actually fairly representative of the overall LucasArts experience. Character building is limited, even the funny jokes get tiresome after you've clicked through them a fifth time, some puzzles are illogical even for games with a sillier tone (monkey wrench, anyone?), and there's often a lot of walking about, repeating conversations, and clicking randomly just to see what happens. Some of them (Thimbleweed Park, MI2) also have exceptionally poor endings.
Out of the games I played, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis was the best, though I got stuck (by forgetting some object in a room outside a complex labyrinth) close to the end and didn't bother completing it. The main character is pre-established, the plot feels like an Indy movie, and I can't recall any genuinely preposterous puzzle solutions (though it was a few years ago now).
I love the Monkey Island games, they're a part of my childhood. But I mostly love them for the music and graphics, not necessarily for the puzzles or the many gags that other people always seem to find a lot funnier than I do.
The Sam and Max episodes were pretty good... partially because the episodic format forced the designers to keep things reeled in. A single 3 hour episode can't get to the point that you have a couple hundred possible solutions to the problem and nothing but brute force to resolve it.
This style of game died for a reason. I'm not saying it needs to stay dead, but I do think every entrant to the genre needs to grapple with those reasons and have an answer to them. The episodic format provided one decent answer, even if I don't necessarily love it as a monetization technique. Adventure games all tend to pass through episode-like gates anyhow because the combinatorial state space becomes overwhelming without them, but they often still carry over state from the previous phases of the game. The full clean-slate wipe of the episodes prevented that from becoming a problem.
A better Indy movie than the last 2, IMO. I go back and replay it every so often.
> The Sam and Max episodes were pretty good
Some of them were funnier than others. It helps if you were attached to the characters having read the comics or watched the show. (The comics had the most concentrated humor - see: the comic about Dracula)
I recall the episode featuring the Abraham Lincoln statue running amok was very funny.
This style of game died because the median attention span across the population decreased over the last 2 decades and something. I don't see a problem in getting blocked and try to brute force your way out of it. Games should be fun but this trend to have perfect, non frustrating gameplay 100% of the time is also part of the problem, IMO.
Graphic adventures ceased to be popular before YouTube and smartphones started to damage the average capability to focus. The famous post https://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html illustrates how the genre became too contrived and self-referential (even poking fun at those who blame “television-atrophied attention spans”).
But the rest of your point stands. I keep reading young gamers complaining about adventures and role-playing games being “too difficult” whenever they don't put big flashing arrows on the next character or place to interact with. I cannot understand that: if one can solve a puzzle without grit, what pleasure does that bring? It's the same as watching TV.
I'd also observe that "brute force" here is an O(source * target) problem, where a source/target pair is some expressible command. e.g., you can't usually combine two locations on the screen, but you can try to combine any item with any screen location, and in some games, any item with any item. Some games add a term for "verb" to that as well, though most games nowadays wisely realize that's not really helpful.
You can see the core reason why people complain about "moon logic" isn't really that the logic is weird. I don't think that specifically bothers too many people. Often it's part of the fun in a way. The problem with "moon logic" is that it means I can't cut down on that search space with common sense or clever-but-grounded logic. In reality rubbing my cat with a piece of tape to pull some hair off of it so that I can wear that tape as a fake mustache is not a sensible option to consider, which is a real part of a real puzzle [1], not just something I made up. A game that consider that a solution to a problem is a game I have to rub everything on everything and it is not just "gamers being lazy" that they don't want to perform hundreds or thousands of possible actions, where all but one of them will result in failure, and depending on the game, some of them may even result in "game over". That's terrible design and that's not the player's fault.
It's an point and click adventure made by a renowned point and click designer for point and click adventure enthusiasts. Some moon logic is to be expected - I didn't find it to be particularly bad in this game. I think its OK to have games that are targeted at veterans of a certain genre.
The 4th wall breaking was lame though, especially the ending.
> there's no logic to solving them so you'd have to resort to clicking everything and with 5 playable characters
Are multiple/simultaneous playable characters a common feature of adventure game design from LucasArts alum? I played Broken Age and thought the idea was novel, but recently played through Day of the Tentacle for the first time and thought the mechanic made things too complicated. So many people say that adventure games are nostalgic, but the ones I played growing up were Kings Quest 6 and Myst (games with only one playable character). These other multiple character adventure games are nowhere near enjoyable for me.
> Day of the Tentacle for the first time and thought the mechanic made things too complicated.
I've not played that in decades, but I remember liking the mechanic. For the most part it wasn't much different from one character with more freedom to move between areas (timezones in that case), but the need to pass objects through time added some variety and humour (send hamster via freezer, but then how do you warm it up again?).
Seems to be a tradition rooted in the original Maniac Mansion. In Thimbleweed Park the multiple characters became tedious due to having to walk multiple people all over and pass items between them, though I enjoyed being able to see the world through the different lenses of how Ray and Reyes vs. Ransome vs. Delores react to things.
Day of the Tentacle (which coincidentally I've replayed in the past week) executed the multiple characters mechanic the best I've seen, since each character was confined to their own area (past/present/future) and you could instantly pass items between them.
A strange take, as the Lucasarts multi-character games, like Dott and Maniac Mansion at least try to push you forward and have reasonable hints. KQ6 has fewer nonsensical dead-man-walking situations (you should see how much worse earlier installments were), but it still has them. Oops, the game is unfinishable now, because of an item you don't have, and it's not even hinted that you need, or you could have obtained earlier!
Thimbleweed park is, if anything, on the easy side of the genre. Not quite as easy as Loom, but it's still on the easy side, and with a built in hint system. Day of the Tentacle's main problem is dependence of US culture. Just like the old "monkey wrench" thing in Monkey Island 2, using an actual monkey as a wrench. Still, in DoTT, you get in-game dialogue that will basically teach you some of it, although it doesn't work quite as well.
The complaint would make more sense if it was limited to Zak McCraken, as that one really s quite tough and random.
I heard Charles Cecil make the same comment about "monkey wrench" in a recent podcast interview, and I must say it was not my experience at all. In my world (45+ years in Western Europe), monkey wrench and pipe wrench have always been synonymous. An adjustable spanner is another tool entirely.
And honestly the Lucas Arts puzzles were serviceable (their philosophy was always "you can't go wrong" (with very obvious but little exceptions), the Sierra "logic" of fucking you silently in the middle of the game was just tiring. Nobody got time for that
I gave up half way through. There was a lack of direction (for me) and too many permutations of clicks, characters, items and locations. The humour was ok, the story I was willing to give a chance. But I didn't want to resort to a walk through so I just kind of petered out.
I would have preferred the same team working on a new IP. Thimbleweed Park 1 has possibly the worst ending of a game, ever. Just an endless series of being told that I am a big dummy for having suspended my disbelief. I see no way of believably returning to that world without the retcon of a lifetime.
If you feel like trying a hail Mary to perhaps improve the ending I have two theories that I couldn't muster enough strength to check. Also, spoilers from here on.
First, there's a fridge that you can't open close to the ending of the game and that I understand as containing the body of the ghost character. I imagine there must be a way to open it.
Second, and related: given that the ending shows you a Basic prompt I imagine there has to be a way to use it for something other than restarting the game. I believe there was (for instance) a part of the game about getting a videotape but, once you had the right equipment, was no longer available to get.
I've long hoped that we've all been getting the bad endi g while there's a second one hidden somewhere, but since I was fairly down after the ending I got I couldn't muster the energy to replay it all again.
> Thimbleweed Park 1 has possibly the worst ending of a game, ever.
I see that someone hasn't played the latest Monkey Island.
I'm guessing, given they're relying on private financing, the ability to reuse assets from TP1 is the major reason to make it a sequel instead of a new IP.
Personally I liked TP1 a lot for the most part, but I agree that the ending was a horrible misstep. I'm not adverse to metafiction, and this is Gilbert after all, that's kind of his jam, but the sheer nihilism of it all left a horrible taste in the mouth. Ironically, for someone who cares so deeply about game design, it felt like an ending entirely borne of Gilbert and his fellow designers pleasing themselves, instead of thinking about how it would feel for the player.
That said, I'm still glad there's going to be a sequel. Hopefully it has more of what I liked and less of what I didn't.
Yes, the ending was kind of lame. Worse, it has been done before, again by Ron Gilbert. It is practically a rehash of the Monkey Island 2 ending, which got us nowhere in the long run.
If you every played the first two Monkey Island games, and understand the lore behind that, then the ending is pretty good. Thimbleweed park, in many way, was a spiritual successor to Monkey Island 2 that Gilbert couldn't make for IP reasons back in the day. With at in mind, I enjoyed the ending. That said, Monkey Island 2 got a lot of criticism for its ending too...
Oh and if you really love that dumb, sophomoric ending, you can also get Return to Monkey Island, which is yet another game Gilbert ruined with this tired trope.
And that's why Curse of Monkey Island is and will always remain the best MI game.
> Oh and if you really love that dumb, sophomoric ending, you can also get Return to Monkey Island, which is yet another game Gilbert ruined with this tired trope.
Isn't it a bit different with Return to Monkey Island? The story is told to kids by Guybrush and Guybrush being an unreliable narrator, it's uncertain how much of the story was real or an imagination by him.
The last scene though shows that something real somewhat similar to what Guybrush told did happen.
Also it completely retcons the ending of Monkey Island 2.
Can't say i disliked Return to Monkey Island much. I liked the art style and the characters. The story wasn't amazing.
MI1 will always be the top for me i guess, but i still remember almost every scene after all these years, so it's not really fun to play again and again. You can play it on almost anything by now [1]
I found Thimbleweed Park 1 very difficult. The puzzles were too hard. I didn't complete it. I tried to play it with my girlfriend, I thought it would be a nice game to work together to play/solve. It stumped both of us. No fun.
The final scene of TP1; the one where they show the rising sun over a hill, that felt so at home for me. It was the only reason I played the game, to see that scene. Something about the colors reminded me of my childhood.
Of course I could just see it on youtube or a screenshot but I wanted it to feel natural, I wanted the story and characters to take me to that hill scene. That’s all I cared about.
Steam has a CLI that installs games. I’ve been meaning to use it to install each of my games and archive their installation for future offline use.
That’s not as convenient as an easy-to-download offline installer, certainly, but seems workable in theory. Maybe I’m unaware of limitation(s) to this approach?
SteamCMD doesn't strip Steam DRM - even with files backed up (which the Steam GUI will do, no need for SteamCMD), you wont be able to use them without an internet connection and authenticating with Steam every now and then.
GOG's bundles are offline and DRM free. You could store them on a disk, and 30 years from now reinstall and play on an airgapped computer with no authentication required.
Not enmeshed in game development and have only done it very lightly: what takes a game like this 1.5 - 2 years to finish?
Like at a minimum, it's art, sound, graphics, and programming. If they are re-using assets, that's one of them ~done. So what's taking them 2 years?
My background is in SaaS type stuff and if I went to who hired me and said it would take 2 years to build out a non-cutting edge product I am pretty sure I'd get fired. So can any game devs briefly/not-briefly explain why game dev like this takes so long? I am just curious to understand the dev cycle.
I'd assume that with investment, he'd have at least one person per team so all of these can largely be intertwined with each other but largely running at the same time.
Great news! Thimbleweed Park is a lovely game. I played it with my children and manage to recreate the atmosphere of those evenings in 1990, spent in front of a Commodore Amiga 500 running Zak McKraken and Maniac Mansion.
Yeah, I loved it, too. Not quite on the level of the first two Monkey Island games, but still a great experience. One of the few games I actually finished in the last bunch of years.
I think the time between the original and this will work out well for me to be excited to play a sequel.
It was fun at the beginning but I got bored of it 2/3rds of the way in. The puzzles were an absolute chore to figure out and solve and the story kinda run out of steam.
As someone who didn’t play many of the point and click adventures growing up, thimbleweed park was a lot of fun. I also like the genre more than visual novels. I kind of felt like the dialogue was supposed to be cheesy so I just rolled with it. Were some of the things a little frustrating? Yea, but I think there is a lot of life left in this genre and I’m sure Ron will make some improvements. I can’t wait to play the next one.
Hmm I don't remember completing the first and other than finding the phone amusing I don't remember much else about it. Will await reviews once done but if anyone hasn't played The drifter yet that is worth checking out
After how he basically gave the middle finger to fans waiting 100 years for the "real" ending to Monkey Island 2, my reaction is
meh -_-
Though Thimbleweed Park 1 was awesome in every way
I wish/hope someone else would take up the mantle of continuing the -spirit- of Monkey Island and make a new franchise with a similar rename: call it Ape Archipelago or something :)
Even though Monkey Island now has a real (i.e. canonical) ending, it sucks. I prefer the original continuation of MI3 to the 25-years-late official, canonical sequel
It's not just the ending, but the flat humor, the lazy puzzles (like clicking multiple times on multiple objects to open the porthole) and the meagre number of interactions on each of the islands after the first one..
It's like his heart just wasn't in it anymore
It felt like a "ehh let's get this over with" at best
or a medium-effort nostalgia-pandering money grab at worst.
I've been playing Thimbleweed Park on Android recently. In general I do love point and click puzzle games but my feelings on this one are very mixed.
* The writing is hit or miss
* The story is just serviceable
* Only about 20% of the jokes land for me
* The constant 4th wall breaking is just bad
And then there's the puzzles. Maybe I made a mistake in selecting hard mode at the start but it's got the worst of the genre's "what the hell" moments... And it's really long. About halfway through I started using a guide and for the majority of the latter game puzzles, there's no logic to solving them so you'd have to resort to clicking everything and with 5 playable characters, about 40 things in my inventory (most of which can be given to other characters) by the end game and 30 or more locations, there's just too much.
I'm going to finish this - probably today actually, I'm right at the end - but I'm not finishing it by feeling excited for the second one.
By contrast I replayed the broken sword games last year and while they show their age and have plenty of what the hell moments, a big difference is that I cared about the story and characters while playing. George and Nico are funny, dumb, endearing. I don't feel that way about anything or anyone in Thimbleweed Park.
I played it when it was released and mostly enjoyed it, though I can't remember what difficulty setting I picked. I bought it mostly because I like Mark Ferrari's art, but ended up completing it. Some characters and jokes were intensely annoying, especially Ransome. I did like Delores, though.
Afterwards, I revisited some LucasArts games I'd played before (Monkey Island 1 and 2), and tried my hand with some I hadn't (Fate of Atlantis, Sam'n'Max, Full Throttle and also Flight of the Amazon Queen, which isn't from LucasArts). I think what you describe is actually fairly representative of the overall LucasArts experience. Character building is limited, even the funny jokes get tiresome after you've clicked through them a fifth time, some puzzles are illogical even for games with a sillier tone (monkey wrench, anyone?), and there's often a lot of walking about, repeating conversations, and clicking randomly just to see what happens. Some of them (Thimbleweed Park, MI2) also have exceptionally poor endings.
Out of the games I played, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis was the best, though I got stuck (by forgetting some object in a room outside a complex labyrinth) close to the end and didn't bother completing it. The main character is pre-established, the plot feels like an Indy movie, and I can't recall any genuinely preposterous puzzle solutions (though it was a few years ago now).
I love the Monkey Island games, they're a part of my childhood. But I mostly love them for the music and graphics, not necessarily for the puzzles or the many gags that other people always seem to find a lot funnier than I do.
The Sam and Max episodes were pretty good... partially because the episodic format forced the designers to keep things reeled in. A single 3 hour episode can't get to the point that you have a couple hundred possible solutions to the problem and nothing but brute force to resolve it.
This style of game died for a reason. I'm not saying it needs to stay dead, but I do think every entrant to the genre needs to grapple with those reasons and have an answer to them. The episodic format provided one decent answer, even if I don't necessarily love it as a monetization technique. Adventure games all tend to pass through episode-like gates anyhow because the combinatorial state space becomes overwhelming without them, but they often still carry over state from the previous phases of the game. The full clean-slate wipe of the episodes prevented that from becoming a problem.
> Fate of Atlantis was the best
A better Indy movie than the last 2, IMO. I go back and replay it every so often.
> The Sam and Max episodes were pretty good
Some of them were funnier than others. It helps if you were attached to the characters having read the comics or watched the show. (The comics had the most concentrated humor - see: the comic about Dracula)
I recall the episode featuring the Abraham Lincoln statue running amok was very funny.
What these games need is a good old-fashioned Aperture Science Material Emancipation Grill.
(Though I guess in the context of these games, that would be considered new-fangled.)
This style of game died because the median attention span across the population decreased over the last 2 decades and something. I don't see a problem in getting blocked and try to brute force your way out of it. Games should be fun but this trend to have perfect, non frustrating gameplay 100% of the time is also part of the problem, IMO.
And now, I'll go back yelling at some cloud.
Graphic adventures ceased to be popular before YouTube and smartphones started to damage the average capability to focus. The famous post https://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html illustrates how the genre became too contrived and self-referential (even poking fun at those who blame “television-atrophied attention spans”).
But the rest of your point stands. I keep reading young gamers complaining about adventures and role-playing games being “too difficult” whenever they don't put big flashing arrows on the next character or place to interact with. I cannot understand that: if one can solve a puzzle without grit, what pleasure does that bring? It's the same as watching TV.
Very much agree.
I'd also observe that "brute force" here is an O(source * target) problem, where a source/target pair is some expressible command. e.g., you can't usually combine two locations on the screen, but you can try to combine any item with any screen location, and in some games, any item with any item. Some games add a term for "verb" to that as well, though most games nowadays wisely realize that's not really helpful.
You can see the core reason why people complain about "moon logic" isn't really that the logic is weird. I don't think that specifically bothers too many people. Often it's part of the fun in a way. The problem with "moon logic" is that it means I can't cut down on that search space with common sense or clever-but-grounded logic. In reality rubbing my cat with a piece of tape to pull some hair off of it so that I can wear that tape as a fake mustache is not a sensible option to consider, which is a real part of a real puzzle [1], not just something I made up. A game that consider that a solution to a problem is a game I have to rub everything on everything and it is not just "gamers being lazy" that they don't want to perform hundreds or thousands of possible actions, where all but one of them will result in failure, and depending on the game, some of them may even result in "game over". That's terrible design and that's not the player's fault.
[1]: The classic Old Man Murray article, for today's 10,000: https://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/78.html The rest of the puzzle isn't exactly a tour de force of logic either.
It's an point and click adventure made by a renowned point and click designer for point and click adventure enthusiasts. Some moon logic is to be expected - I didn't find it to be particularly bad in this game. I think its OK to have games that are targeted at veterans of a certain genre.
The 4th wall breaking was lame though, especially the ending.
> there's no logic to solving them so you'd have to resort to clicking everything and with 5 playable characters
Are multiple/simultaneous playable characters a common feature of adventure game design from LucasArts alum? I played Broken Age and thought the idea was novel, but recently played through Day of the Tentacle for the first time and thought the mechanic made things too complicated. So many people say that adventure games are nostalgic, but the ones I played growing up were Kings Quest 6 and Myst (games with only one playable character). These other multiple character adventure games are nowhere near enjoyable for me.
> Day of the Tentacle for the first time and thought the mechanic made things too complicated.
I've not played that in decades, but I remember liking the mechanic. For the most part it wasn't much different from one character with more freedom to move between areas (timezones in that case), but the need to pass objects through time added some variety and humour (send hamster via freezer, but then how do you warm it up again?).
Seems to be a tradition rooted in the original Maniac Mansion. In Thimbleweed Park the multiple characters became tedious due to having to walk multiple people all over and pass items between them, though I enjoyed being able to see the world through the different lenses of how Ray and Reyes vs. Ransome vs. Delores react to things.
Day of the Tentacle (which coincidentally I've replayed in the past week) executed the multiple characters mechanic the best I've seen, since each character was confined to their own area (past/present/future) and you could instantly pass items between them.
A strange take, as the Lucasarts multi-character games, like Dott and Maniac Mansion at least try to push you forward and have reasonable hints. KQ6 has fewer nonsensical dead-man-walking situations (you should see how much worse earlier installments were), but it still has them. Oops, the game is unfinishable now, because of an item you don't have, and it's not even hinted that you need, or you could have obtained earlier!
Thimbleweed park is, if anything, on the easy side of the genre. Not quite as easy as Loom, but it's still on the easy side, and with a built in hint system. Day of the Tentacle's main problem is dependence of US culture. Just like the old "monkey wrench" thing in Monkey Island 2, using an actual monkey as a wrench. Still, in DoTT, you get in-game dialogue that will basically teach you some of it, although it doesn't work quite as well.
The complaint would make more sense if it was limited to Zak McCraken, as that one really s quite tough and random.
I heard Charles Cecil make the same comment about "monkey wrench" in a recent podcast interview, and I must say it was not my experience at all. In my world (45+ years in Western Europe), monkey wrench and pipe wrench have always been synonymous. An adjustable spanner is another tool entirely.
And honestly the Lucas Arts puzzles were serviceable (their philosophy was always "you can't go wrong" (with very obvious but little exceptions), the Sierra "logic" of fucking you silently in the middle of the game was just tiring. Nobody got time for that
> Only about 20% of the jokes land for me
I found the game so intensely unfunny (and there are few things I am selfishly rooting more for in life than another great point and click adventure)
I gave up half way through. There was a lack of direction (for me) and too many permutations of clicks, characters, items and locations. The humour was ok, the story I was willing to give a chance. But I didn't want to resort to a walk through so I just kind of petered out.
Did you like the King's Quest games?
I found the puzzles fair enough, but my impressions about writing and characters match yours.
I suspect that while Ron Gilbert is great at what he does, Tim Schafer was always the funnier writer of the Monkey Island trio...
Worse than the Babel fish dispenser?
I wonder did you enjoy the Monkey Island games. I really loved Delores and Ransome particularly in TWP.
I didn't play on hard, but that wasn't my experience with the puzzles. I thought they were all pretty good. I didn't use a guide at all.
It's been a while, but I think I pretty much agree about the writing and story. I pretty much don't even remember it.
I would have preferred the same team working on a new IP. Thimbleweed Park 1 has possibly the worst ending of a game, ever. Just an endless series of being told that I am a big dummy for having suspended my disbelief. I see no way of believably returning to that world without the retcon of a lifetime.
If you feel like trying a hail Mary to perhaps improve the ending I have two theories that I couldn't muster enough strength to check. Also, spoilers from here on.
First, there's a fridge that you can't open close to the ending of the game and that I understand as containing the body of the ghost character. I imagine there must be a way to open it.
Second, and related: given that the ending shows you a Basic prompt I imagine there has to be a way to use it for something other than restarting the game. I believe there was (for instance) a part of the game about getting a videotape but, once you had the right equipment, was no longer available to get.
I've long hoped that we've all been getting the bad endi g while there's a second one hidden somewhere, but since I was fairly down after the ending I got I couldn't muster the energy to replay it all again.
> Thimbleweed Park 1 has possibly the worst ending of a game, ever.
I see that someone hasn't played the latest Monkey Island.
I'm guessing, given they're relying on private financing, the ability to reuse assets from TP1 is the major reason to make it a sequel instead of a new IP.
Personally I liked TP1 a lot for the most part, but I agree that the ending was a horrible misstep. I'm not adverse to metafiction, and this is Gilbert after all, that's kind of his jam, but the sheer nihilism of it all left a horrible taste in the mouth. Ironically, for someone who cares so deeply about game design, it felt like an ending entirely borne of Gilbert and his fellow designers pleasing themselves, instead of thinking about how it would feel for the player.
That said, I'm still glad there's going to be a sequel. Hopefully it has more of what I liked and less of what I didn't.
Yes, the ending was kind of lame. Worse, it has been done before, again by Ron Gilbert. It is practically a rehash of the Monkey Island 2 ending, which got us nowhere in the long run.
I thought it was particularly amusing because it was such a callback to MI2.
If you every played the first two Monkey Island games, and understand the lore behind that, then the ending is pretty good. Thimbleweed park, in many way, was a spiritual successor to Monkey Island 2 that Gilbert couldn't make for IP reasons back in the day. With at in mind, I enjoyed the ending. That said, Monkey Island 2 got a lot of criticism for its ending too...
Oh and if you really love that dumb, sophomoric ending, you can also get Return to Monkey Island, which is yet another game Gilbert ruined with this tired trope.
And that's why Curse of Monkey Island is and will always remain the best MI game.
> Oh and if you really love that dumb, sophomoric ending, you can also get Return to Monkey Island, which is yet another game Gilbert ruined with this tired trope.
Isn't it a bit different with Return to Monkey Island? The story is told to kids by Guybrush and Guybrush being an unreliable narrator, it's uncertain how much of the story was real or an imagination by him.
The last scene though shows that something real somewhat similar to what Guybrush told did happen.
Also it completely retcons the ending of Monkey Island 2.
Can't say i disliked Return to Monkey Island much. I liked the art style and the characters. The story wasn't amazing.
MI1 will always be the top for me i guess, but i still remember almost every scene after all these years, so it's not really fun to play again and again. You can play it on almost anything by now [1]
[1]: https://www.scummvm.org/downloads/
I found Thimbleweed Park 1 very difficult. The puzzles were too hard. I didn't complete it. I tried to play it with my girlfriend, I thought it would be a nice game to work together to play/solve. It stumped both of us. No fun.
I had a weird relationship with the first game.
The final scene of TP1; the one where they show the rising sun over a hill, that felt so at home for me. It was the only reason I played the game, to see that scene. Something about the colors reminded me of my childhood.
Of course I could just see it on youtube or a screenshot but I wanted it to feel natural, I wanted the story and characters to take me to that hill scene. That’s all I cared about.
> P.P.P.S There will be a GOG version.
Very good news. GOG provides offline installers so you can always backup, install, and play your games forever.
Steam has a CLI that installs games. I’ve been meaning to use it to install each of my games and archive their installation for future offline use.
That’s not as convenient as an easy-to-download offline installer, certainly, but seems workable in theory. Maybe I’m unaware of limitation(s) to this approach?
https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/SteamCMD
SteamCMD doesn't strip Steam DRM - even with files backed up (which the Steam GUI will do, no need for SteamCMD), you wont be able to use them without an internet connection and authenticating with Steam every now and then.
GOG's bundles are offline and DRM free. You could store them on a disk, and 30 years from now reinstall and play on an airgapped computer with no authentication required.
<not asking in a mean way>
Not enmeshed in game development and have only done it very lightly: what takes a game like this 1.5 - 2 years to finish?
Like at a minimum, it's art, sound, graphics, and programming. If they are re-using assets, that's one of them ~done. So what's taking them 2 years?
My background is in SaaS type stuff and if I went to who hired me and said it would take 2 years to build out a non-cutting edge product I am pretty sure I'd get fired. So can any game devs briefly/not-briefly explain why game dev like this takes so long? I am just curious to understand the dev cycle.
I'd assume that with investment, he'd have at least one person per team so all of these can largely be intertwined with each other but largely running at the same time.
</not asking in a mean way>
Great news! Thimbleweed Park is a lovely game. I played it with my children and manage to recreate the atmosphere of those evenings in 1990, spent in front of a Commodore Amiga 500 running Zak McKraken and Maniac Mansion.
Yeah, I loved it, too. Not quite on the level of the first two Monkey Island games, but still a great experience. One of the few games I actually finished in the last bunch of years.
I think the time between the original and this will work out well for me to be excited to play a sequel.
It was fun at the beginning but I got bored of it 2/3rds of the way in. The puzzles were an absolute chore to figure out and solve and the story kinda run out of steam.
As someone who didn’t play many of the point and click adventures growing up, thimbleweed park was a lot of fun. I also like the genre more than visual novels. I kind of felt like the dialogue was supposed to be cheesy so I just rolled with it. Were some of the things a little frustrating? Yea, but I think there is a lot of life left in this genre and I’m sure Ron will make some improvements. I can’t wait to play the next one.
Loved the first part. Can't wait to play it. Didn't know there was an iOS Version for the first one, time to replay that on my phone on a plane :D
Please let it not be meta. Please oh please oh please.
Thimbleweek Park 1 was nothing but meta.
Return to Monkey Island was corpo art and meta. "The real treasure was the friends you made along the way, computer game player". Thanks Ron.
I've forgotten the ending of The Cave, it was probably meta too, but at least it had some good slapstick.
I gave up the belief he could abstain from that after he ruined Return.
What takes it so long to release this kind of game early 2028 ?
Hmm I don't remember completing the first and other than finding the phone amusing I don't remember much else about it. Will await reviews once done but if anyone hasn't played The drifter yet that is worth checking out
After how he basically gave the middle finger to fans waiting 100 years for the "real" ending to Monkey Island 2, my reaction is
meh -_-
Though Thimbleweed Park 1 was awesome in every way
I wish/hope someone else would take up the mantle of continuing the -spirit- of Monkey Island and make a new franchise with a similar rename: call it Ape Archipelago or something :)
Even though Monkey Island now has a real (i.e. canonical) ending, it sucks. I prefer the original continuation of MI3 to the 25-years-late official, canonical sequel
> We'll surely avoid scurvy if we all eat an orange.
> My skills with a sword are highly venerated!
> Too bad they're all fabricated.
I pretty much saw the ending an effort to put the story to end and move on after all the years of speculation.
it's clearly in that direction (and that's fine), but I would debate the "effort" part
It's not just the ending, but the flat humor, the lazy puzzles (like clicking multiple times on multiple objects to open the porthole) and the meagre number of interactions on each of the islands after the first one..
It's like his heart just wasn't in it anymore
It felt like a "ehh let's get this over with" at best
or a medium-effort nostalgia-pandering money grab at worst.