My favorite game of all-time is Maniac Mansion, so I'm the ideal audience for Thimbleweed Park, which is made by Maniac Mansion's original designers, Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick. Thimbleweed Park is a love letter of sorts to the point-and-click adventure games that Gilbert and Winnick made almost thirty years ago, while also trying to push the genre further than it has gone before. Yet as someone who has played through his fair share of point-and-click adventures over the years, from the Telltale Games to games like Oxenfree, Thimbleweed Park is certainly ambitious, but it might also bite off more than it can chew.
Thimbleweed Park begins as a murder mystery, as a dead man is found and two government agents are brought in to investigate. But as this investigation expands and the player explores this small town, the options become greater, the world becomes much larger than expected, and the amount of characters the player is controlling at once is often overwhelming. Once this game gets rolling, the player is controlling five different characters, each with their own expansive to-do list, in a world that is almost too big for its own good.
At first, Thimbleweed Park avoids the point-and-click logic of LucasArts games that makes players try weird combinations of items to solve puzzles. It's almost as if Gilbert and Winnick are trying to make puzzles that can be answered with real world logic. For example, early on if you need a nickel, you'll find a sign that says "bottles exchanged for 5 cents" at a convenience store. You find a bottle, bring it in, get a nickel. Simple as that. But the further the game goes on, the more difficult and out-of-the-box these puzzles get.
While I'm genuinely impressed that Thimbleweed Park can balance as many characters, items and stories as it does, these puzzles can muddle this experience, and make it hard to figure out exactly who is supposed to do what and with what items. Again, this is standard point-and-click adventure logic, but with more moving pieces than I've ever seen in an adventure game, it can be a lot to manage at times.
Very often, Thimbleweed Park feels like a natural progression as to where the genre that made Maniac Mansion would go: bigger, more ambitious, and with more options. But I admire the smaller scale that adventure games often adhere to. Even Telltale's Walking Dead franchise limited your character to only a few locations at once, and a smattering of items. Thimbleweed Park took me twelve hours to complete, and I would've preferred this game was split into two parts, since there's a distinct moment where the story breaks into a whole new direction.
I do wonder how enjoyable Thimbleweed Park would be for someone who didn't know point-and-click adventures from decades ago. So much of my enjoyment of this was the massive amounts of Maniac Mansion and Money Island references thrown throughout the game, and even knowing those games makes some of these puzzles easier to solve. This game can be extremely fun when you know what Gilbert and Winnick are going, but I imagine kind of strange without that knowledge.
I find the ambition that Gilbert and Winnick bring to point-and-click adventures to be daring and a cool example of how big and bold the genre can still go. Yet I don't know if I want adventure games to go in this sprawling direction. Thimbleweed Park is almost too expansive and too large for its own good. It almost feels like there should be a middle ground between something like Thimbleweed Park and Maniac Mansion that doesn't currently exist. I'm so glad that adventures games like this are still being made, but I do think they'd find greater success on a smaller scale than this.
