Thimbleweed Park
Twin Peaks meets Monkey Island, but what’s the result?
Thimbleweed Park takes place in a conspiratorial, alternate-reality version of America. One of the few things that make sense about it is that it’s a graphic adventure game. Developers Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick are best known as the creators of the Maniac Mansion game and the Monkey Island series, and their latest collaboration is an explicit throwback to those games, complete with rich, chunky pixel art and laced throughout with jokes.
The game never lacks madcap absurdity, but its bones and characters are familiar enough to keep its puzzles grounded in a graspable logic: federal agents Ray and Reyes investigate a murder while Delores, Ransome the Clown and the recently dead Franklin (a ghost haunting the local hotel) dig into the mysterious fire that destroyed the local town’s PillowTronics factory.
Thimbleweed Park’s best puzzles take advantage of its large cast, both by providing them with particular abilities – the agents aren’t afraid to muck around in the sewers, and Franklin can float through doors, for example – and by letting players effectively operate in five places at once. However, most importantly, even Thimbleweed Park’s most complicated, multi-step brain-teasers manage to integrate smoothly with the remainder of the game: there’s nothing here that doesn’t introduce a new part of the town, explore a character’s backstory, push the plot forward, or all three. Where Gilbert’s humour is rather heavy-handed, his puzzles are lean, breezy, and keenly measured.
Nostalgic ornament
In practice, you control each of Thimbleweed Park’s five playable characters with a set of on-screen verbs and an inventory of assorted bric-a-brac to use them on. Unfortunately, the differences between the ‘push’, ‘pull’, ‘open’, ‘close’, and ‘use’ controls end up being more or less irrelevant; this means that the game’s retro-styled interface is mostly relegated to nostalgic ornament, which is a shame.
The end result is a game that can feel oldfashioned for its own sake, one that leverages its pedigree to excuse a muddy, unfocused plot leaden with inside jokes, references, and fourth-wall-breaking asides. A few misfired gags and Ransome’s incessant cursing might be forgivable – after all, self-awareness is a hallmark of the form – but Thimbleweed Park borders on self-indulgence. While Gilbert and Winnick have perhaps earned the right to navel-gaze, it weighs rather heavily on an otherwise robust gaming experience.
Thimbleweed Park’s best puzzles take advantage of its large cast