Thimbleweed Park, a new old point and click by Ron Gilbert

[CaptainD]

I don't think anyone was actually suggesting that!  More just a point of interest, "could we have made this with AGS?".

Ha ha! My bad! I have ASD and I tend to miss that and take everything quite literally! I've lost count of the times my friends and family make some jokey statement and I correct them or question it because I took it literally. I think that will always be my blind spot!

Haha no worries.

On another note, I didn't know you were involved in such a prestigious game (my blind spot is not paying attention properly!) - congrats on that.

[LameNick]

I haven't got far yet, but I already love the game. There are bunch of bugs, some minor things that could have been improved upon and few things that didn't exactly fit my taste of humor. But from the most part I think the way the game is designed is actually quite brilliant, the atmosphere is awesome, the experience of playing the game in every possible way feels very rich and stimulating and often funny in a cute typical Monkey Island way.

And frankly, comments insinuating that every other Tom, Dick and Harry on AGS forums regularly makes better games for free and Ron Gilbert with the team got funded because of some stupid undeserved hype just to show how incompetent they really are and make an inferior overpriced product, are getting on my nerves, because (although I'm very far from being a game developer) to me it just very clearly is not true.

[MiteWiseacreLives!]

Aww man, I forgot one of our own was working on this game!
Congratulations!
Nope, not going to slam it without trying either way. It's just a point of curiosity for myself to wonder what kind of advantages the new Ron G engine would have and whether it was important for him to build a new one or was it just something they wanted to do.
Now do we all start guessing which lines you wrote? (yay a game within a game)

[Trapezoid]

Finished it earlier today! From a puzzle-design perspective, it's pretty ambitious and carefully constructed.

Mark Ferrari's backgrounds are pure eye-candy, though they mix a little oddly with the goofy bigheaded character art. Honestly, the biggest pang of nostalgia I got was

Spoiler

walking through the temp art at the end. That's when the style meshed the best, and I sorta wish the whole game achieved that look, which looks like what they originally planned. Can't really fault anyone for hiring Ferrari though.

[close]

The humor is even more wink-wink than Monkey Island ever was and that can get on your nerves. The plot has a similar weakness to The Cave in that you play a bunch of random grab-bag characters of different styles and genres and it kind of dilutes the overall atmosphere. Having a bunch of disparate goals made it hard to identify with any one, the way you do with "become a pirate" or "rescue Sandy."

Not to focus on the negative! I'm just worried about it getting overhyped. Ultimately, it's 10-20 hours of really well-designed adventure gaming with tons of charming callbacks and details. If you're on this forum of course you should get it.

[LUniqueDan]

[...] comments insinuating that every other Tom, Dick and Harry on AGS forums regularly makes better games for free and Ron Gilbert with the team got funded because of some stupid undeserved hype just to show how incompetent they really are and make an inferior overpriced product

Well,
Is the game actually overated ? : Yes.
Ok, the graphics are professional (they are really nice indeed) and there's voice acting but :

Originality / Story : Zero. I'm very very sorry here, but yeah. I dunno how people will buy the "it's ok because it's all about nostalgia" rhethoric, but overall it ends up to be our average Lucasart fan game until the game switch to a very annoying and predictable *cliche* "twist".   
Gameplay : Missing at least 50 hotspots and 100 lines of dialogues. Empty ginormous rooms. Inconsistent interface. The game tempo is broken.
Puzzles : Some inside the motel are clever, but otherwise fairly standard. Logical solutions to random problems created to justify puzzles. 
Duration : I get through the game in 18 hours (Hard), two-third of them wasted because the to-do lists are somewhat misleading and the puzzle solutions are chapter-related. And, my bad, I didn't know how to skip repetitive speeches. Otherwise, it's basically an average-size RON game with fewer locations, fewer interactions and fewer characters which none of them are particulary original nor interesting.

The game is excellent for 30 minutes, then it slowly self-destruct itself not really knowing if it's a drama, humoristic, adventurous (clue: it's not) or post-neo-budhist-4th-wall-breaking-b.s. (spoiler: it is)

EDIT :
Snarky, I was refering to the font inside the paperwork.

[Snarky]

What to think about the puzzles and writing is of course subjective, but come on! This is by no means "an average-size RON game": it's much bigger than your average-sized AGS game, and significantly bigger than most full-length commercial titles. 18 hours is a hefty chunk of time, and even if you spent some of that being stuck (which we normally call "playing an adventure game"), there's just no way you could have completed it in a third of the time (perhaps unless you're speed-running it, already knowing exactly what to do to take the shortest possible path through the game).

Gameplay : Missing at least 50 hotspots and 100 lines of dialogues. Empty ginormous rooms. Inconsistent interface. The game tempo is broken.

Could you be more specific about the UI and missing hotspots/dialogue? I was a bit thrown at first that you can't look at characters or try talking to non-characters, but that is clearly a deliberate and internally consistent design decision.

Snarky, I was refering to the font inside the paperwork.

Paperwork? I did see that the font in the phone catalog is pretty wonky, if that's what you mean.

[LUniqueDan]

There's cliché, and there's

Spoiler

"*Hahahahhahahahahahah*Sheldon, it's like in adventure games !", "All of this was a dream. Even for you KrustyRansome. THE END" cliché.

[close]

We don't want to make a game “inspired by,” or “paying homage to” classic point & click adventures, we want to make a real classic point & click adventure.

There is "being stuck" and "being stuck by bad design" (mostly from a game sooo proud of the MM revolution...)
12/18 hours is redoing the same maze 20 times before you get hinted that it was purely for MI1 nostalgia purpose and have nothing to do with the solution even if there is a shovel in the game. It's using the same item on the different characters even if the item are not use by the game (as far as I know). It's listenning (without skipping) to 2 long lines of unhandled event for an item that's going to be use as a totally random tool at the very end.

So... I still believe it's pretty much the size of a RON game. If you stretch downtown with empty buildings, double/restart the puzzles, add 12 floors to a building, add a slow elevator and put 4/5 playing characters (so the player rarely know if something was plain impossible or just character-related) add pseudo-mazes, use the same twice...

Most interesting rooms are empty. More it was difficult to access a room more empty it's going to be (and therefore not rewarding, the worst, imho, being the Pizza room). Pretty much all location after 2 hours of gameplay fits that description. In fact, pretty much everything after 2 standard gameplay hours cross the line of decay. And it doesn't really matter, because... well, you know, Ze ending. Arround the end the player can't even talk, the characters cutscene together. At a point, the game even suggest to watch the game trailer to have a clue. (Yes this is empty) 

Anyway, enough Thimbleberries for me.

(My bad, by "paperworks" I meant all the Agendas / Security book etc... that you collect within the game, the ones that use a non-horizontal font)

[Snarky]

It's clear you don't like it, but spoiling the ending with no warning is not cool, LDan.

Just finished it, in fourteen hours, with maybe one or two hours spent stuck or going down wrong paths (I'm pretty impatient, and looked up hints on I think four occasions; I don't think any of the puzzles were really unfair, though the size of the game and your inventory means it's pretty easy to overlook or forget something, and the non-linear nature of the puzzles means that it's sometimes hard to know what you need to do next, as the TODO lists don't distinguish between immediate tasks and longer-term goals). I'd say it's about double the length of your average Wadjet Eye game, probably three or four times the length of a "typical" full-length RON game. With map-travel and double-click or hold to run (plus the ability to solve many puzzles with whichever character was handy), I don't think the size of the rooms really slowed the gameplay down to any considerable extent, and honestly, unless you're just riding that elevator up and down for no reason, you're not spending more than a few minutes over the whole length of the game there.

Overall I thought it was quite solid. The one thing I really wish is that the game wasn't so adventure-game self-referential. It gets old fast, and it's already been done so much in fan and indie games (in particular, it invites comparisons to the Ben & Dan games, which aren't really in Thimbleweed's favor). Plus, it just seems a bit tacky when it's your own games being referenced.

Edit: Oh, one more thing. There are quite a lot of loose ends in the story, aren't there?

Spoiler

Above all, I don't think we ever actually learn exactly how the German guy died. It wasn't Willie, obviously (we never do get around to clearing his name), and it seems clear that Chuck and/or PillowTron3000 was ultimately responsible, but how did they do it? And there's a suggestion that the Sheriff/Coroner is a robot controlled by PillowTron, right? If he's in on it, why didn't they just cover up the death? And why do they keep knocking out Reyes (in my playthrough), yet never eliminate him completely? I feel like all the handwaving in the world about secret plans and "not drawing the attention of the developers" isn't really enough to resolve the game's original mystery.

[close]

[Danvzare]

So... I still believe it's pretty much the size of a RON game. If you stretch downtown with empty buildings, double/restart the puzzles, add 12 floors to a building, add a slow elevator and put 4/5 playing characters (so the player rarely know if something was plain impossible or just character-related) add pseudo-mazes, use the same twice...

Alright then, if that's true, I challenge you to make that RON game.
And no, that's not a joke, I'm serious and actually want to see you make that RON game. Get a team together and make it. We need more new RON game, and you just came up with the premise for a new one. Not only that, but according to you, it should be just as good (or bad) as Thimbleweed Park.

By the way, I've yet to play Thimbleweed Park, but I'm looking forward to it.
So far though, I think everyone's complaints can be boiled down to having very high expectations, just because Ron Gilbert worked on it. The guy hasn't worked on an Adventure game in over two decades as far as I know, so I'm not surprised that it's lacking a few things.

Hopefully they learn from their lessons and make another which is better.

[Mandle]

I was very interested in this conversation, but I happened to glance at something that Snarky wrote about someone spoiling the end of the game in their post.

As I plan to play this game, I'm now scared to read this thread further...

And yeah: Posting unhidden spoilers is NOT COOL!!!

[Cassiebsg]

Mandle, Snarky has edited the spoiler into hidden tags, it should be safe to read now.  Just make sure to avoid the hidden tag... 

[Esseb]

Mandle won't see that reply until after he's finished the game.

Hi, future Mandle!

[Mandle]

Mandle won't see that reply until after he's finished the game.

Hi, future Mandle!

Naw...I'm back...I just scrolled down real quick to look and see if it had been fixed

[Dave Gilbert]

Played and finished it! All-in-all, I enjoyed it. Ron & co created exactly what they said they would: a Maniac Mansion style throwback with gorgeous retro visuals and fun characters. The puzzles were logical (if spread out a bit thin), the town was fun, and the sound design and VO acting was GREAT. My only issue was the ending. Which was... an ending. Personally I didn't like it, but I seem to be in the minority.  I know my own ending to the Blackwell series was kinda divisive so I won't throw stones here.

[Mandle]

I know my own ending to the Blackwell series was kinda divisive so I won't throw stones here.

It was the only ending that fans had not already spammed-guessed ahead of time... And I happen to love it. So unexpected and yet fitting... You didn't just avoid the obvious endings, you gave the characters their final story arcs, and also made us cry, and also made us hope.

[Problem]

Just finished it, and I liked it a lot. I didn't back the game on Kickstarter back then, because I was highly sceptical. But it turns out that this is one of the kickstarter games that delivers on their promises in all aspects.
And it's a big game. Saying it is the size of an average RON game is ridiculous - of course I haven't counted the actions required to complete it, but they are many. The game has a lot of puzzles, most of them being on the easy side. Since parts of the story are very non-linear, I sometimes didn't know what to do next, but on the other hand I rarely got stuck either.
Granted, sometimes there's no real motivation or logic why the different characters are working together (or sharing knowledge without even having met each other). This is one of the main challenges in such an ambitious concept (being able to switch between five playable characters throughout most of the game), and it seems the developers just accepted the "adventure game logic" that came with this approach.
The puzzles themselves are fine. And in terms of gameplay and pacing, Thimbleweed Park is masterfully designed. The story keeps progressing with every little puzzle you solve, and the whole game flows really well. The first half is particularly tight, there's always something happening and new stuff to be discovered. Very rewarding, and this is something only very few adventure games pull off.

Now, what I didn't like about it: It doesn't just break the fourth wall. I drives a bulldozer through the fourth wall. The endless self-references and adventure game jokes got tedious after a while. Sometimes this was indeed very funny. But in my opinion Thimbleweed Park had its best moments when it forgot about its legacy and did its own thing.

[DBoyWheeler]

I think this was seen in GOG as well, if I'm not mistaken.  I saw it on Steam too!

Hmm... I might need to look into this sometime.

[CaesarCub]

Since everyone is giving an opinion, why not join in.

I finished the game, I really enjoyed it, even if it's far from perfect. Way better than the second part of Broken Age, which I basically suffered through.
The art is gorgeous, and the effects work, even if it can trigger a lot of OCD having so many different pixel sizes in the screen at the same time.
The story is good, even if the ending is not what I would have wanted.
The game felt huge to me, hell I felt that the amount of rooms you could access at any given time were too many, and that can make it so confusing when you get stuck, and you have too many places to backtrack.
The other problem I had related to this is that some characters will do things others won't, and at points it's not clear if you picked the wrong character, or if what you want to do is simply not possible at all.
Another thing that got boring pretty fast was the sheer amount of references and fourth wall breaking.
But still, despite all this, the game was quite fun, and I really hope they will be able to make another game with the same team but with a completely different tone and setting.

A game I would completely recommend to anyone that likes adventure games. Not so sure about people new to the genre since the game becomes too big and too complicated very fast, but then again I didn't play the game in easy mode.

Spoilery rant:

Spoiler

While I do get that all the self-reference and awareness of the characters are explained away by the fact that they are in an adventure game, I think the only jokes I enjoyed were the jabs at Sierra On-Line, and still those were too on the nose.
I guess this kind of break-reality endings are part of what Ron Gilbert enjoys (I still remember feeling weirded out by the MI2 ending) but I still enjoyed this game.

[close]

[KONEY]

Hi guys,

I'm curious to know if I'm the only one heavily disappointed by the way this game has been made. Art and story are top notch but the graphics are not real pixel but vector based. For example when characters walk far their singular pixel are scaled down and this isn't pixel graphic in my opinion. Also the game is forced to 16:9 so there's no way to display it on CRT monitor.

I should have been developed with AGS, not Unity

[Problem]

The mixed resolutions are of course a matter of taste. I ususally don't like it, but for Thimbleweed Park it works quite well, because the game uses visual effects you can't achieve otherwise. The pixels are scaled and rotated, sometimes the whole screen is tilted, and in some situations screen shader effects are used.
But that doesn't mean it's not pixel art. The screens and the characters are clearly drawn as pixel art - vector art is something completely different. The engine scales and rotates the pixel art and achieves effects that the developers wanted, but an engine like AGS isn't capable of. But there are no vector graphics in this game.

And where did you get that it was made with Unity? Thimbleweed Park was not made with Unity. Ron Gilbert wrote his own engine.