Y'all, this is a fantastic game, and if you like point and clicks in any way, you should play it. It's a PNC, so you know the drill, made by the original Lucasfilm crew, using (I think? some variation of) the SCUMM engine. It looks great, the soundtrack is moody and incredible, and it's hilarious throughout. Puzzles are 98% just right, but there are a few dumb stumpers in there. It's just a really thoughtful, fun, funny game, with a surprisingly touching ending.

I'm taking one star off for the couple ridiculous puzzles, and the main offender of any displeasure in the game - traveling. It takes a long time to get everywhere. Eventually, you get a map which, they don't really tell you, but you can use to "fast" travel. I figured this out eventually, but that still left four characters having to hoof it everywhere. Within the last few chapters, I learned you can actually go back and get enough maps for everyone, which, if you're following along, okay duh that makes sense now, but it just never occurred to me. Even still, so much wasted time.

I'm also incredibly proud to announce I found every single "speck of dust" on my own. :)

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.

We finished Thimbleweed Park last night, after several nights playing it in our usual "tandem gaming" style. Everything about this game seems tailor-made for me, and I love so many of its parts; but I hated it for so much of my time playing it, and the ending didn't do anything to change my mind.

Some of my problems were very minor technical issues. Every time a character told me "I can't reach that" while I was running around on the map or trying to navigate through a scene transition felt like salt rubbed in a wound.

But my biggest problem was puzzle design in conflict with the multi-part game structure. So many times we were stuck trying to solve a puzzle that the game simply wasn't going to let us solve in the part of the game we were in. I think there's a good idea there; but if the game is going to give you puzzle components in an earlier part of the game, it needs to be very clear when you're done with those components.

We used the hint system quite a lot; but I generally didn't feel like it was that useful. Again, most of it came back to pacing: the most helpful thing the HintTron ever told us was "you can't actually solve this puzzle yet"; which seems like evidence of something gone wrong earlier in the design.

My favorite sequences in the game were the flashbacks. There, the puzzle design shined by confining the scope to only things that could actually be done. In my opinion, the "parts" structure should have been used to do more of this; but, in stead, it felt more artificially limiting and confusing than anything.

Finally, since we were playing the game late, it was full of post-game distractions that would not have existed in the original build. We spent multiple nights tracking down tokens for the arcade and getting a high-score in one of the games, only to later find out that this had nothing to do with any terminal puzzles at all.

I want to like this game so much. I enjoyed Maniac Mansion. I've enjoyed a bunch of other LucasArts adventure games. I feel like this game shows that where Broken Age really needs more Ron Gilbert, Thimbleweed Park needs more Tim Schafer. Maybe that's just a convenient summation in my head that's ultimately vacuous and meaningless, but it's what I keep coming back to. Thimbleweed Park has really great technical scope, but feels purposeless to me. Broken Age has grand vision and ambition, but stumbles under its own weight. I wish the creativity between those two projects could come together to make timeless classics again.

This game started off so well and interesting! You had this dead body and this weird town, and it was up to you to navigate the areas by point-and-click methods to solve the murder. However, the story totally flipped around with multiple branches that go all over the place.

Gameplay: It's a point-and-click adventure, so depending on your method of play (PC, console, whatever), you walk around and click on things. Sometimes you also have to combine items, give items to others, use them, etc. If you never played this type of game before, it is pretty delightful. Overall, it should take about 10 hours to complete.

Story: I don't even know what happened with the story, honestly. I was pretty disappointed with a lot of unresolved or chosen resolved parts. The game is divided up into several chapters, some are short and some are quite lengthy.

Difficulty: There is Normal and Hard mode, but regardless, it does get pretty challenging once you get further into the game. The Hard mode involves more advanced steps to complete a task (e.g., a task you did in Normal takes two steps, the same task takes four steps in Hard) and there are way more scenes to be had.

Characters: All the characters were distinctive and pretty interesting. There is a lot of overlap with character design (intentionally...), but each one has a strong personality they maintain throughout the story.

If you were a fan of the hey-days of Monkey Island and Day of the Tentacle, you will probably get a kick out of this. However, I wouldn't bank of really loving it too much, as I personally found the second half of the game pretty disappointing.