• Log In | Sign Up

  • News
  • Reviews
  • Top Games
  • Search
  • New Releases
  • Daily Deals
  • Forums

Adventure Gamers - Forums

Welcome to Adventure Gamers. Please Sign In or Join Now to post.

You are here: HomeForum Home → Gaming → Adventure → Thread

Post Marker Legend:

  • New Topic New posts
  • Old Topic No new posts

Currently online

DalediegoLady Kestrelrtrooneywalas74

Support us, by purchasing through these affiliate links

   

Thimbleweed Park—Maniac Mansion style game from Ron Gilbert & Gary Winnick

Total Posts: 4

Joined 2014-06-14

PM

“they absolutely delivered on their Kickstarter promise”

I think they nailed this, but almost not in the way they intended…
Ron said at several points during development that it was turning out to be something between Maniac Mansion and Monkey Island…
Now, I think he meant for the game to be better than both of them, and to just “feel” like it could have been released between them.

But I think we inadvertently got a game where the actual enjoyment/quality is somewhere in between them.
I think Thimbleweed Park is funnier than Maniac Mansion and has more locations to explore and isn’t as frustrating, so compared to Maniac Mansion it succeeds (though I think Maniac Mansion had weirder/better characters and scenarios and was more memorable).
But it isn’t as interesting or funny as Monkey Island, and it doesn’t have the sense of scope and exploration that Monkey Island has. So for me, it still feels like Monkey Island is a big step up from Thimbleweed Park in almost every area.

I think multiple playable characters can be ok if there is a strong reason… eg. in DOTT you weren’t just swapping characters, but also time periods, to give a sense that they were separate worlds almost. And in Fate of Atlantis it’s a minor sidekick character that is sparingly used for a few specific puzzles.

But with Thimbleweed Park, it feels like there is no main character, so I never got any real attachment to any of them. It felt like the multiple characters were just done as a technical exercise to see if it could be done.
Like if they had gone, “let’s see if we can have them control one of the Monkey Island Cannibals the whole time too”... “why?”... “just because.”

Same with the story, it felt like the need to do something experimental and different took precedence over making the game fun to play. “I’ve got a really good idea for an ending”... “what about the rest of the game?”... “eh, something about a murder and a will reading I guess, but let’s make it clear that those things are unimportant.”

It feels like a whole bunch of random ideas and gameplay things that were all dumped into a game, with nothing really tying them together.

     
Avatar

Total Posts: 46

Joined 2003-11-23

PM

I’ve just started Part 4, after ca 7 hours of playtime, so I believe I am close to the midpoint. And struggling to keep interested, to be honest. What I gather about the ending (haven’t read the spoilers, but just by knowing that all the 4th-wall-breaking is somehow tied to it, plus reading Chuck Mansion’s diary, I think one can make educated guess about where we’re heading) doesn’t help.

I’d second practically everything critical said about the game upthread, especially by LenP, especially here:

LenP - 21 April 2017 10:20 AM

Like if they had gone, “let’s see if we can have them control one of the Monkey Island Cannibals the whole time too”... “why?”... “just because.”

(...)

It feels like a whole bunch of random ideas and gameplay things that were all dumped into a game, with nothing really tying them together.

Yes, I feel like this conversation: “Let’s see if we can have XYZ too” - “Why?” - “Just because.” was made many, many times while Thimbleweed Park was being designed. Which is fine and refreshing in the sense that a lot of games in our genre (and in other genres, too) are more likely to decide “Because everyone else does it.”, abandoning any opportunity do experiment. But all those ideas here don’t mesh at all.

Like having a group of such distinct playable characters that seem to have different goals and abilities, and making them function at almost Gobliiins-level of interchangeability gameplaywise.

Or having reasonably big world to explore from early on, but have the locations either basically non-interactive (eg. cemetery) or full of red herrings. The red herrings work very well in the more limited portions, like the multi-step mailing-the-letter puzzle in Delores’ flashback (easily my favourite part so far), where what could have been a run-of-the-mill fun-with-items puzzle for LucasArts veterans, was made interesting and non-obvious with all the additional items. It was not difficult per se, yet I really felt that was a challenge that actually encouraged me to stop, observe, analyze options, and solve.

But in wider context they only frustrate. Case in point: all the dust that I at first dutifully colected, then I realized it appears randomly and the game is obviously mocking me for collecting random junk and so stopped doing that, then was told it’s actually an objective which I could have progressed probably about 75% into if I hadn’t stopped. Ha ha. Shifty Eyed

 

     

This space intentionally left blank.

Avatar

Total Posts: 294

Joined 2017-01-12

PM

Totally agree with you guys about the game being a bunch of random ideas smooshed together (though I still enjoyed it).

AFGNCAAP - 21 April 2017 02:04 PM

Like having a group of such distinct playable characters that seem to have different goals and abilities, and making them function at almost Gobliiins-level of interchangeability gameplaywise.

I think this came about from first of all deciding to have a Maniac Mansion style game. They probably wrote the story much later. And seeing as MM had 3 playable characters they felt they had to do the same.

It was really interesting to me that the 2 games I played most recently (SOMA and TWP) both deal with being uploaded to a computer but in completely different ways.

(big spoilers!) In TWP Chuck and Delores both see being a computer character in a generated world as a terrible thing. OMG they’re watching us, it’s not real! Anything is better than this! Even though they know they won’t exist after being deleted.
SOMA is the opposite. Faced with extinction of the human race they decide it’s better to carry on inside a simulation and go to incredible lengths to create it. But there is also hesitation and questioning whether it is the right thing to do. You see firsthand the fear of the protagonist at not existing anymore, while TWP the fear is about existing in an artificial world. I am not sure if I was Delores I would decide to shut everything down so confidently.

I know the 2 games are totally different styles and TWP is not a serious game but it was still interesting the way the different games dealt with the topic.

     

Total Posts: 4

Joined 2014-06-14

PM

AFGNCAAP - 21 April 2017 02:04 PM

plus reading Chuck Mansion’s diary, I think one can make educated guess about where we’re heading doesn’t help.

Yeah, once I read the diary I was pretty sure I knew what was going on, as it gives some pretty massive hints, and I was roughly correct.
So I think the big reveal is potentially given away a number of hours too early for a lot of people. And you then try to bash through the will reading puzzles to get to an ending that you aren’t that surprised by.

BitingWit - 21 April 2017 02:37 PM

I think this came about from first of all deciding to have a Maniac Mansion style game. They probably wrote the story much later. And seeing as MM had 3 playable characters they felt they had to do the same.

I always thought this game was started from an illogical angle, trying to make something that was like Maniac Mansion.
Now, Maniac Mansion has its hardcore fans and it is very important historically, but it’s not a game that I think most adventure game fans would want to replicate. It’s nowhere near as popular as Monkey Island 1 & 2 or DOTT, etc. because it’s more like an early prototype. Why not use your best games as a starting point?

And then it was like, “we’re going to make it like Maniac Mansion… but without dead-ends or deaths, like Monkey Island. Oh, and with inventory items too, like Monkey Island. Oh, and people want us to make the art more like Monkey Island, so we got Mark Ferrari who did Monkey Island.”
Ideally they would have kept going and got rid of the bobble-heads and the multiple characters and put it in a setting that takes advantage of it being a larger game, just like Monkey Island, but they stopped at this half-way house and then added a bunch of random innovations.

It’s like they had already solved all the problems of Maniac Mansion when they did Monkey Island, but they forgot and went back too far for the sake of it. And then the things they did improve are things you don’t really notice when you’re playing like lighting or scrolling, etc. If I’m not really enjoying exploring the settings or the jokes, then the lighting is the least of my worries.

I think some of this was about creating a “real” successor of sorts to Maniac Mansion, as I’ve seen Ron complain about things in DOTT a lot before (he wanted the characters to be able to move between all the time periods… why? Just because. And for the sake of innovation I guess).
And I think Ron is a bit irked that everyone loves DOTT and assumes he worked on it and people rarely remember it’s a sequel to the game he actually did, Maniac Mansion.
So I think part of this is going, “here is the REAL successor to Maniac Mansion, from the ACTUAL creator.”

So yeah, I think that angle contributed to the mish-mash of ideas that were thrown together.

     

Total Posts: 345

Joined 2012-04-04

PM

Hmmm…quite a bit of negativity, recently it seems. Interesting.

I will say I thought the setting was an absolute joy to explore, and instead of some games that send you all over the place and don’t really get you invested in any one location, I loved the fact it was ONE LARGE TOWN that you got to unravel the mysteries of. And even the locations that werent’ used very often (i.e cemetery) didn’t worry me, as we had a map for large portions of the game, and they were so lovely to look at it didn’t feel much of chore to me to explore, even when stuck. I thought they did a pretty fair job utilizing the locations, and a lot of places got more than one use out of them. 

Are the characters entirely memorable? Well, I think the clown is. And it’s always fun playing as a ghost. But otherwise, they were all serviceable enough to the plot, and that’s as much as I get out of most adventure games I’ve played that weren’t LucasArts.  I don’t find Kate Walker or even April Ryan very memorable characters (blasphemy I know!) but it doesn’t tend to affect my enjoyment of the games a whole lot. Unless they’re completely irritating, but I didn’t find any character in TP irritating (outside those fourth-wall references in the beginning).
 
Did the story wind up a bit of a mess? Yeah, probably, but the atmosphere of the whole game, and the excellent puzzle-design (and this aspect deserves more credit than it’s receiving I think) made it pure joy for me.  Honestly one of the most enjoyable experiences I’ve had with a point-and-click adventure game in years.

Certainly has it’s flaws, but I found a lot more praise than criticize. 4 or 4.5 star game for me.

     
Avatar

Total Posts: 294

Joined 2017-01-12

PM

Very true about the puzzles - they were generally very good, although by no means did I think they were a “masterclass”. There were some bad puzzles. One of the worst was the trampoline. You couldn’t see the page so there was no reason to bounce on it!

     

Total Posts: 4

Joined 2014-06-14

PM

I agree that the puzzle design was superb, particularly the balance of how challenging it was. It was challenging enough to have me stumped for a while several times, but logical enough that I eventually figured them out. So that aspect was very satisfying and enjoyable.

Some people have criticized the puzzles for not being logical in terms of story/character motivation, like how some puzzles had characters acting on info they didn’t know personally. This didn’t really bother me, as I took it as just part of the gameplay. Also maybe because I wasn’t invested in the story and because of all the 4th wall breaking, it seemed not a big deal.

A.A - 21 April 2017 09:57 PM

I loved the fact it was ONE LARGE TOWN that you got to unravel the mysteries of.

I think this was a big part of why I was disappointed—I was expecting it to be a lot more mysterious than it turned out to be.
From the screenshots and trailers it set it up as like, “this looks like a normal rundown town… but there are hidden mysteries behind it” and I think if it had really delivered on that it, it would have been really interesting.

Most of the locations had no mystery to them at all. The newspaper place, the post office, the tube shop, the Quickie Pal, the bank, the radio station/tower, the diner, the sheriff/coroner place, even the cemetery were all pretty run-of-the-mill locations that never got any stranger or gave off any vibe of mysteriousness.

The mansion was very straightforward as well, I guess the mysterious part was meant to be Chuck’s room, but there wasn’t much to it. The circus could have held some mysteries, but it was just an empty run-down circus.

The occult bookstore SHOULD have been really mysterious and had more to it, but it came across as pretty banal and Madam Morena sounded like an ordinary stoner and didn’t have anything interesting to say or do. There was no sense of danger that she could curse anyone else, and I think she was totally under utilized. It was like she was just another incomplete brainstorm idea that was thrown into the game and never developed properly. The Voodoo Lady from Monkey Island had a lot more atmosphere and mystery around her.

The sewers could have held some cool secrets, but for the most part you’re just walking through screens you can’t interact with. You do briefly find a crocodile/dinosaur thing and a fridge, but they’re kinda random and don’t do anything.

The hotel does at least have some mysteriousness to it, because ghosts. I think if it had been an area like LeChuck’s ghost ship where you had get past ghosts or deal with them in some kind of way, that could have upped the mysteriousness of it. But because you played as one of the ghosts, I think it undercut any kind of tension. Though I did enjoy the mechanics of playing as the ghost, that was enjoyable, and the hotel did feature some of the more interesting characters and situations and puzzles.

I had high hopes for the woods. Using the navigator’s head was a nice touch and then there was something buried in the woods that seemed like it could be really interesting. But as far as I’m aware you can’t dig anything up? It was like, “this is something from a more interesting game, sorry.” So then you find the van and you go beneath the earth. FINALLY, I thought, we’re going to find the hidden mysterious setting beneath the town. But thirty seconds later you’re back up and never get to go down there again.

The factory. By this time you pretty much have guessed the big reveal so you just want to get on with exploring. But then you walk right through half of it with no interaction and then don’t need to go through it again. By this time I’m having trouble enjoying the factory because I’m thinking, “so this is the mystery, a handful of rooms in a factory,” and the game is clearly winding down as everything has suddenly got a lot easier.

The most interesting setting of the game? The wireframe world. That had a genuine subvertive novelty to it and reminded me of Space Quest 4 when you went back to SQ1. But of course you just walk straight through this part with no interaction necessary.

If you’re billing the game as a big mystery, then you really need a bunch of exciting mysteries to uncover. A game needs interesting characters, plot points, and settings to explore anyway, but ESPECIALLY if you’ve said there are hidden mysteries to unravel.

     

Total Posts: 100

Joined 2009-02-07

PM

The game was easily a 9. OK, an 8, and I would give it a 10 for promoting how rare it since it’s by the creators of Monkey Island and Maniac Manson.

I have to subtract a point because the story was in a small part predictable and unfunny(rarely) and some puzzles were redundant/forced(rarely).

But it was obviously a game that must be played by all adventure fans, the puzzles are doable even on hard mode, and it did not even have bugs.

     

Total Posts: 100

Joined 2009-02-07

PM

BitingWit - 22 April 2017 01:02 AM

Very true about the puzzles - they were generally very good, although by no means did I think they were a “masterclass”. There were some bad puzzles. One of the worst was the trampoline. You couldn’t see the page so there was no reason to bounce on it!

You missed the animation. The page flew off the window and it ended up near the top left from the trampoline. Though I found that puzzle relatively easy anyway (once I figured out with a googling what a ‘spotter’ is in trampolining.

For me, the puzzles that pained me (though not by much, I still enjoyed it), were kinda pedantic in a sense that the solution was intuitively easy but you had to do it a special way.

e.g. I had missed the sign in the shop about returning bottles for 5c. That was my mistake, however, the game made no sense that in a town of several shops and even cashing machines, nobody would turn 10c into 5c X 2, or even that the lady in the copying machine place itself wouldn’t do change! That wasted me 2 hours until I noticed the “return bottles” sign but it’s all good since I didn’t have to cheat.

In general puzzles of that kind (“pedantic”) are almost inevitable in adventure gaming so it’s all good, especially after you realize you should be more careful with information conveyed in graphics and not just look-at text.

     
Avatar

Total Posts: 111

Joined 2009-05-12

PM

I recently finished the game as well and I really liked it. I think I agree with the sentiment of some people in that I was expecting a little bit more of the story and the setting. I liked it and enjoyed for what it is, after all it shares the DNA of games like Monkey Island with that type of absurd humor and which doesn’t really take the story that seriously. However, I had trouble being fully invested, specially at the beginning, because of this. After being thrown in a murder mystery and in small “mysterious town” to explore, all the humor, four wall breaking and lack of interesting characters threw me off. But the more I played, the more I warmed up to it until I was really engrossed, and I guess the puzzle design had a lot to do with it.

I agree that the difficulty was just right (in hard mode). I was only stuck a couple of times but stumbled on the solution just a little bit later. The only puzzle that had me going around for a long time until I had to peek a walk-through was putting the radioactive waste in the puddle.

Definitely one of the things that caught my attention were the optional tasks or red herrings. Some I really thought were part of the solution to some of the puzzles and I wasted a lot of time wandering around to see how to solve them. I’m thinking of two of them:

- The treasure in the woods that some of you mentioned, I really thought we could dig it specially with the knowledge that one of the characters has a shovel obsession and he even inherits a new one from the will. I really thought we had to find his old one

- The plant in Quickie Pal, you can put the radioactive waste and it will grow. Then if you leave and come back again it would eat Leonard. It was funny, but I really thought we were supposed to do something, like meddle with the camera. Also, you can fix the machine outside the Quickie Pal and take out a movie, and I remember the guy saying something about not giving us access to the camera because they didn’t have more Betamax cassettes. Why put all that stuff in there, even mini puzzles if it is going to be for nothing?  Neutral

All in a all it was a great experience and it did deliver on its promise of bringing that kind of adventure gaming and puzzle design that I remember, but I have to agree that some things didn’t work for me like the story and the ending. On one side I liked that it was different and it was in tone with the themes of the game, the four wall breaking and overall self awareness, but on the other hand I didn’t like that things get basically unresolved or that they didn’t matter in the end (the murder, random things like Ray or Reyes appearing on a monitor laying in the Coroner’s office or when Ray or Reyes gets dragged down to the sewers. What was that all about? .

     
Avatar

Total Posts: 2653

Joined 2013-03-14

PM

The most interesting thing I learned from that is, that even this retro throwback game had a final budget of over 1 million dollars, as they did have half a million of funding outside Kickstarter.

     
Avatar

Total Posts: 8998

Joined 2004-01-05

PM

There’s an update that adds an option to disable “annoying in-jokes”. This is quality post-launch support Smile

They are also working on a “little DLC”

And I finally finished the game this week, what a ride!

     
Avatar

Total Posts: 129

Joined 2007-05-15

PM

It’s really strange…

At one point Reyes was no longer playable for me and after reading here it seems that there was a cutscene of him being knocked out but I never saw that.  Just at one point he disappears from the selectable characters.

Also I tried using the navigator and every character just complained that it smelled - even in the forest.  How did you get it to work?

     

Total Posts: 187

Joined 2005-01-25

PM

There’s no cutscene when he gets knocked out, but there should be a cutscene while he’s knocked out. Perhaps it depends on something else to trigger it, though.

To use the navigator’s head just have it in your inventory. When you’re in the forest it animates, rotating to point you in the right direction.

     

You are here: HomeForum Home → Gaming → Adventure → Thread

Welcome to the Adventure Gamers forums!

Back to the top