Thimbleweed Park™

Super fun and engaging

Fun and cheeky :)

When Thimbleweed Park is working to build its charming little universe full of daft characters and intrigue, you can feel the wealth of expertise that Gilbert and the crew have brought to the experience. There are cute witticisms, (perhaps a few too many) callbacks to previous games/the genre itself, and the way everything is delivered makes you want want to unravel its mysteries. And all this is brought to life with gorgeous pixelart, (mostly) decent voice acting, and a perfectly-fitting soundtrack that just has enough [i]Monkey Island[/i] juice to be comfortably familiar yet also stand on its own. It's not perfect, because the sheer size of the game can sometimes feel overwhelming. Juggling the inventories of four or five characters quickly becomes tiresome, and encourages scenarios where the [b]player[/b] wants to get a puzzle completed and will employ a [b]character[/b] who has no narrative reason for doing so, just because they're closer to the objective. Quick travel [i]is[/i] a feature, but it's also kind of cumbersome; and navigating the hotel (a significant location for multiple chapters) requires a painful amount of waiting and extraneous clicking just to get any-damn-where on that elevator. And yet you'll put up with that because you genuinely want to see what happens next, and the puzzle-solving is (mostly) devoid of adventure game moon logic. But once you hit the fourth chapter, everything just begins to feel overburdened. You're hot swapping between characters way more often in a vain attempt to recall a use for every inventory item and location across the entire game. Those player characters have little dialogue or interactions, making them feel more like item mules for a group tangentially following a shared goal while also on their own personal subquests. The restrictions on who or what can interact with something start to feel a little more oblique. And plot twists that make bugger all sense start to rear their ugly little heads. And then in the last couple of chapters the game just kind of... gives up. The plate-spinning routine becomes too much for the writers, and rather than resolve any of the plot threads they've created for players to engage with, they just handwave everything up until that point away. The final chapter is a hamfisted deus ex machina where [spoiler]the antagonist legit hands each character a macguffin and tells them to bugger off and complete their individual story arc[/spoiler]. The preceding hours are genuinely charming and engaging enough to stick around until that point (enough to squeak it into "recommended"), but such an unsatisfying ending very nearly invalidates that time and emotional investment. Here's hoping that pacing is the biggest improvement for the recently announced sequel.

peak artstyle but i really really wanted to play the games in the arcade

10 von 10 Schade dass es nicht mehr solcher Spiele gibt.

Giocato quasi 10 anni dopo l'uscita, ma è un gran gioco, forse la più bella avventura grafica a cui abbia mai giocato! Molto divertenti le reference e le quotes verso altri giochi LucasFilm, verso il game design e il mondo dei videogiochi e delle avventure grafiche, molto bello il finale, mi è piaciuto davvero, davvero tanto!