Throwback Thursday

The Nintendo Switch is getting a lot of double-dip love as of late and we've got another contender on ours hands. The point-and-click adventure Thimbleweed Park is being port?ed over as confirmed by co-creator Ron Gilbert, who shared a first look at the game running on a Switch in handheld mode.

Vague, cryptic, puzzling clue about our multiple Thimbleweed Park console announcements next week: //t.co/gpmFwfMlKX

— Ron Gilbert® (@grumpygamer) July 6, 2017

Gilbert also added t?hat the port is being handled internally. Even better.

In our review, Kevin wrote that it was "a rare pleasure to get to play a game like this again. I had a blast exploring Thimbleweed Park, and if you've ever en??joyed telling ??Bernard Bernoulli or Guybrush Threepwood what to do, you will too."

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Goofy Pixel Noir

Thimbleweed Park was Kickstarted back in 2014 and promised a brand new game in an old genre, a return to the classic point-and-click adventure titles produced by LucasArts in the late '80s and early '90s. The title has an impeccable pedigree since both Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick made their names working on one of the first adventure titles ever made, Maniac Mansion. In fact, Gilbert is credited with introducing the concept of cutscenes to video games as a way ?of transitioning between two action seq??uences. 

Thirty years have passed since Maniac Mansion's release, and the genre it exemplified has died, been reborn, and relapsed into a coma. You don't see too many point and click adventure titles these days, as story-driven games don't need to rely on the old adventure formulas to get their message across anymore. It's been nearly two and a half years since the Kickstarter closed, and the game is finally releasing today. It's already been a great month for games, so how does Thimbleweed Park stack up?

Thimbleweed Park (Xbox One, iOS, Android, Mac, Linux, PC [reviewed])
Developer: Terrible Toybox
Publisher: Terrible Toybox
Released: March 30, 2017 (Xbox One, PC, Mac, Linux), TBA (iOS, Android)
MSRP: $19.99

Thimbleweed Park lets you take control of five very different characters, each with their own skills and specialties. You'll move them around the town, picking up anything that isn't glued down to try and figure out the mysteries that surround you. It's set in 1987, though there're some anachronisms to be found if you want to get pedantic. The story begins as a murder mystery, and borrows some of its trappings from several early '90s favorites like Twin Peaks and The X-Files. Later on, there's even some stuff in there that calls back to The Matrix. It does ??a great job of setting the mood and maintaining tension, even though you can play at your own pace and there's only one (easily avoidable) way to get y??ourself into a failure state.

While each character is mostly self-sufficient, there are a few puzzles that will require two or more of them to work together. Fortunately, they can share almo??st anything they find with the other characters as long as they occupy the same physical space. Th??e game teaches you this early on, as you must use the GIVE command to make sure the same character has both the film and the camera required to take a picture. Once this is taken care of, you can switch between the controllable characters at any time by selecting the person you want to play as using a drop-down menu in the upper right. 

The nine verbs in the lower left of the screen are how you interact with everything in the world, and you can also use them on your inventory, to OPEN a package or combine two items with USE. While you can click a command every time for a dose of early '90s nostalgia, you can also use the keyboard shortcuts on the left side of the keyboard. Thimbleweed Park does support a controller on PC, but I elected to play it with a mouse and keyboard for the authen?tic experience.

 Thimbleweed Park sold itself on nostalgia, and for fans of the adventure genre, it more than delivers on that promise. There are many, many references to past games, more than I could count. For example, it seems as though Dave and Sandy from Maniac Mansion settled down here to run the town's diner. The Edmund Mansion mansion bears a striking resemblance to the Edison's abode. There's even some puzzle callbacks, action sequences that'll give you a bit of déjà vu if you've memorized the puzzles in The Secret of Monkey Island or Maniac Mansion. Stuff like this doesn't detract from the story and would probably sail over the head of anyone who hasn't played those previous titles, but it'??s a great bit of fanservice for people who g?rew up with them or discovered the remakes later in life.

While Gilbert and Winnick have every right to rest on their laurels, Thimbleweed Park surpasses their earlier work by a considerable margin. Adventure games are more about establishing characters and setting a mood than about action, and the town and residents of Thimbleweed Park have personality to spare. From the abandoned carnival to the vacuum tube store to the defunct pillow factory, every setting and character is distinct and memorable. This is helped by both the spectacular pixel art and the full voice acting, something that wasn't possible when the duo first teamed up on Maniac Mansion. The art has some modern touches, with dynamic lighting and other special effects added where appropriate. The precise, handcrafted pixel artwork fits the quirky story well, and there's even animation that matches the characters' mouth movements to the English dialogue?.

Speaking of dialogue, the voice work is excellent, even though the actors all seem to be new to the genre. Each of the main characters has a distinct personality that comes through in their dialogue. Ray is world-weary, Reyes is upbeat and a little naive, Delores is optimistic even though her family is falling apart, deceased pillow salesman Franklin is convincing as a total doormat. Cursed clown Ransome is annoying, and the gravel-voiced Simpsons character Krusty the Clown is a pretty clear?? influence, but he's meant to be unpleasant. It's probably not a coincidence that he's the character who absorbs the most physical abuse throughout the course of the game.

Each of the characters has their own arc and tasks to accomplish, and you can check their agenda by looking at their personal to-do list at any time. While most inventory items can be shared, some are tied to a specific person, which helps differentiate the cast. Aspiring game developer Delores is the only one who can solve computer and programming related puzzles, and she's usu??ally in charge of repairing the town's vacuum tube-based technology. Additionally, some characters can go where others can't. Ghos??tly Franklin is stuck haunting the site where he met his demise, jerkass clown Ransome won't let anyone else inside his trailer, and the federal agents Ray and Reyes are the only ones who can access specific crime scenes.

While the actions you have to take can be skewed at times, there's a consistent internal logic that makes the puzzles solvable if you pay attention to your surroundings. I only got really stuck once, and that was because I never bothered to LOOK at the corpse I was supposed to be investigating at the beginning of the game. If you get stuck working with one character, it's easy to switch to a different one and focus on one of their tasks for a while instead, and doing so might trigger a brainwave about what to do on that first character. Once you have no further use for an item, you can use one of the town's many trash receptacles to toss your excess inventory, and you can be confident you won't need it because your character won't discard anything that's still useful. It's a nice touch, and helps keep the puzzles? fr?om feeling overwhelming.  

I particularly liked how Kickstarter backers were credited. Instead of a lengthy list of sponsors in the game's credits, backers above a certain funding tier were given the opportunity to add their name to the Thimbleweed county phone directory, or to write a short passage that can be found in one of the town's libraries. This is a callback to the funny book titles that were often found in LucasArts titles, and lets backers find their contribution as sort of a personal easter egg. It also makes sorting through the irrelevant names or titles to find something you need part of the puzzle. Fortunately, the people you need to contact to complete tasks are highlighted so they stand out on the page, and it's easy to find the correct titles in ??the library by using the provided index.

I admit it's a petty gripe, but I was slightly annoyed to see that misspelled words and mistakes made by backers weren't corrected be??fore being imported into the game. I understand that this would have been a lot of extra work for the developers, but feel that it makes things look a lot less professional. Fortunately, the backer books are easily ignored if you're not interested, and you'll be able to go to the correct titles without pixel-hunting for hours. If for some reason you DO want to p??ixel-hunt, there's an optional side quest that involves finding a single piece of dust on every screen.

As much as I enjoyed Thimbleweed Park, it's not perfect. There's a lot of backtracking, which, although endemic to the genre, can become frustrating. This is mitigated somewhat once each character has a map of the county, which allows you to travel between destinations much more swiftly. You're still going to run back and forth a lot though, and you'll ??probably spend a good chunk of time waiting for the damn elevator in the hotel. Only one character can use it at a time and there's no fast travel between floors, so if you want to take your whole crew to the penthouse, they'll have to take turns and wait. A "group up" or "meet here" command would have been a godsend for juggling items between the various inventories. There's not really a story reason for the five characters to start wo??rking together, other than the fact that you're telling them to. And while I understand the decision to have different verbs instead of a more generic USE input, there are two or three commands there that frankly aren't necessary.

When the Kickstarter for Thimbleweed Park was launched, the stated goal was to create a game that plays like a lost LucasArts adventure title. In my opinion the developers succeeded brilliantly, creating a game that feels like a forgotten relic of LucasArts' heyday, but with enough touches to make it a little more relevant to a modern audience. It's fair to say no one makes them like this anymore, particularly since Telltale discovered a more lucrative formula based on popular franchises and keeping track of player actions. It was a rare pleasure to get to play a game like this again. I had a blast exploring Thimbleweed Park, and if? you've ever enjoyed telling Bernard Bernoulli or Guybrush Threepwood what to do, ?you will too.

_{[This review was based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}

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Coming to Xbox One and computers March 30

Thimbleweed Park, an adventure game led by industry legend Ron Gilbert, doubled its kickstarter goal when it was announced in 2014. It's a beautiful throwback to early Lucasarts adventure titles like Maniac Mansion and Day of the Tentacle-- which is ?appropriate, since Gilbert and artist Gary Winnick got their start working on the former. The title has been in development for two and a half years but it's finally nearing release, and the team announced today that it will be av?ailable on Xbox One, Windows, Mac and Linux on March 30.

Thimbleweed Park will launch with English voice and ??subtitles, and the subtitles can be changed to the French, Spanish, or Ita??lian languages. Russian subtitles are in development and will be added as a free update after launch.

I got a chance to play an early version at PAX last year, and it's been near the top of my most anticipated games list ever since. A Steam page for Thimbleweed Park launched simultaneously with the announcement, though the price has yet to be determined. The game will hit Steam, GOG and Xbox Live on? March 30, and iPad/iPhone/Android later this?? year. The team says they'd like to bring it to other consoles and platforms, but no other versions have been confirmed yet.

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Thumbs-on with this thrilling throwback

PAX this year was a little strange for me. I was brought on to Destructoid just as the deadline to apply for media badges expired, so I went to the show as a regular attendee, and didn't take appointments like Brett and Jo??rdan did. I still wanted to help out where I could though, so Brett recommended that I spend some time checking out independent games no one?? had appointments for in the Indie Megabooth and elsewhere on the show floor.

The first game I tried out was also one of my favorites. Thimbleweed Park was successfully kickstarted back in late 2014, and promised a single-player adventure in the style of the LucasArts classics Maniac Mansion and Day of the Tentacle. It's being headed up by Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick, the co-directors of Maniac Mansion, and the demo I played made several references to their shared past at the studio and ??the games they created there.

The LucasArts adventure games of the late '80s and early '90s were known for two things: their sense of humor, and their friendliness to players. Unlike the competition, LucasArts adventures rarely had a situation where the player could permanently fail and have to reload their save. This encouraged experimentation, and left the creators ample room to put in jokes when you tried to rub two items together that didn't make a lot of sense to combine. Thimbleweed Park looks? to continue both of these traditions, and both my friend and I let a few giggles escape as we played through the PAX demo.

Thimbleweed Park begins with two federal agents (legally distinct but bearing striking similarities to Mulder and Scully) examining a dead body, face down in a river under a bridge. Their first task is to photograph the corpse "before it pixelates any further." This seems simple enough, as the female agent is already holding a Polaroid camera. Unfortunately, she doesn't have any?? film.

This is where the game introduces the idea that each character you control has their own separate inventory. The male agent has the film, and you must use the "Give" command to pass it from one character to the other before you can take the picture and move the plot forward. You can select which character you want to control using a menu on the top right, and the "Give" command allows you to shuffle items between them a??s long as they occu??py the same space. Once this is taken care of, the female agent must "Use" the film with the camera, and then "Use" the camera on the body to take the photo.

These commands are handled by clicking on one of the action boxes in the ??lower left of the screen. There are nine of these, and they allow you to try different interactions with things in your inventory and in the world. These boxes should look familiar to adventure game veterans; for every object you can try to Open, Close, Give, Pick up, Look at, Talk to, Push, Pull, or Use it with another item on screen. It's a variant of the old SCUMM (Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion) engine used in several LucasArts adventure games.

Once we had taken the picture, we looked around the crime scene a little more. We found a chainsaw in some deep brush and as we kept moving to the right, heard violin screeches that sounded like the shower scene from Psycho emanat??ing from a?? nearby sewer grate. The male agent assured us that there was nothing to worry about, however, just someone practicing their violin in the sewer. Like you do.

We decided at that point to head to town, and walked around a bit, separating the two agents to cover more ground. The town itself has a lot of character, and has clearly seen better days. Abandoned, run-down buildings abounded, and even though we were limited in where we could walk to in the demo, it was clear we'd be exploring the town thoroughly, so there was a lot of attention to detail regarding the setting. There's some weird stuff going on here, but it's all below the surface, and we got sort of a Twin Peaks vibe from exploring. One running joke is that everything?? in the town runs on vacuum tubes, and some of the puzzles seemed to involve finding or repairing tubes on v??arious appliances.

We sent the female agent to the town's police station, a??nd the male agent to a diner, where he struck up a conversation with one of the locals. The waitress? began telling him the story of the ruined carnival at the edge of town, and at this point the game shifted perspectives as we played through a flashback. We lost control of both agents at this point, and took control of a new character.

This section dealt wi??th how the carnival's star attraction, insult comic (and Ronald McDonald lookalike) Rans??ome the Clown became cursed and lost his fortune. Before we could move the story along, we took control of Ransome, and had to find his makeup, comb his clown afro, and recover his joke book from one of the carnies, to whom he owed a sizable debt. I'm not sure how you lose money betting on the duck shooting gallery, but somehow he'd managed it.

Thimbleweed Park is clearly based on adventure games from the late '80s and early '90s, but it does make some concessions to more modern technology. Although everything is crafted out of pixels, there's no apparent limit on how many colors can be show??n on-screen at once. I also noticed that Ransome's home is in a trailer, and the entire screen tilts to follow his weight as he walks from one side of it to the other. After we managed to prepare and go onstage, we lost control of Ransome and regained control of the?? male agent.

Some of the humor works better if you're familiar with Gilbert and Winnick's earlier work. Again, Thimbleweed Park isn't shy about reminding fans of Maniac Mansion and Day of the Tentacle, making references to both of those games as well as both men's former employer, LucasArts. For example, during Ransome's segment, the amount of money he needs to repay to the carnival worker is $1138 -- a reference to George Lucas's first film, THX 1138.

After finishing up the not-quite-tragic story of Ransome (who is, quite frankly, a total jackass), we wandered into a dark alley, where the male agent was?? hit in the head by a shadowy assailant and dragged off screen. Control switched immediately back to the female agent, who we'd left standing in the police station. It's worth noting that at this point we lost control of the male agent entirely, meaning we lost access to his inventory as well. Presumably, you'll be able to recover characters eventually in the full game, but once w??e lost him in the demo, he was gone for good.

We looked around the station for a bit, hoping to meet the sheriff or at least alert the coroner, but no one was there. One of the booth attendants we spoke with said that some of the characters that will be in the final game had been removed for the demo to make it flow more quickly. Still, we poked about in the coroner's office, discovering another Maniac Mansion reference when we clicked on the skeleton, advising us to return it to Dr. Fred. After wandering for a b??it, we sent the female agent to the same dark alley to check on the male, and wouldn't you know, she got kno??cked out and dragged away too. Since we were now fresh out of playable characters, this ended the demo.

Some of the town was blocked off, and it was clear that there was more to exp?lore in the full game. My friend and I had a lot of fun even in the short time we had to play the demo, and I'm looking forward to seeing more of this one before its targeted January 2017 release.

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He won't pay your phone bill, though

Ron Gilbert, the writer and director of Secret on Monkey Island, is teaming up with Gary Winnick, the art director of the LucasArts games of yore, to create Thimbleweed Park. The Kickstarter began last year, and one of the backer rewards was your name being found in the i??n-game phone ??book.

Gilbert says that "During t??he Kickstarter, someone in the comments suggested that it would be neat if they could also record a voicemail message. Not?? being above stealing a good idea, we quickly added that and pretended we thought of it all along."

But now that they have to actually go about collecting the voicemails, they have their work cut out for them. If you go on the Thimbleweed Park blog page, there's a link you can follow to he?lp test the voicemail system. You don't have to be a backer to help them out, either. Are you a Good Samaritan with a microphone and a few minutes? Don't sa??y anything too dirty.

Voicemail Testing [Thimbleweed Park]

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'Use balloon animal with corpse'

Today at Microsoft's gamescom conference in Cologne, Germany, The Secret of Monkey Island creator Ron Gilbert took the stage to announce that his upcoming adventure game Thimbleweed Park would be coming to Xbox One and Windows 10.

Thimbleweed Park raised over $626,000 on Kickstarter in late 2014, nearly doubling its initial $375,000 funding goal. The project is a spiritual successor to both Maniac Mansion and the Monkey Island series, aiming to evoke the experience of late? '80s/early '90s adventure games. 

The title is also coming to Mac, Linux, and mobile ??platforms, an??d aims to launch by June 2016.

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The gas and the chainsaw: Together again for the first time

We were lucky enough to have Ron Gilbert (Maniac Mansion, Monkey Island) on Sup Holmes a few ??weeks back. Looking back, it looks like Ron may have been utilizing the show for a little pre-kickstarter promotion. Explains why he did the who??le show in pixel-face. Fine by me. I'd have his pixel-faced puss on the show every week if I could. 

Ron hinted that he may be working with original Maniac Mansion artist Gary Winnick again soon, but I didn't think it would be this soon. But here we are, looking at a new SCUMM-style game from the creators of the term "cut scene" and the fathers of an entire genre. As a longtime fan of Maniac Mansion, Zak McKracken, and the first two Monkey Island games, I'm feeling like this all over again. 

It's a murder mystery that contain hundreds of locations and puzzles, all centered around Thumbleweed Park, a town that "...once boasted an opulent hotel, a vibrant business district and the state’s largest pillow factory, but now teeters on the edge of oblivion and continues to exist for no real reason." Sounds like a cross between Twin Peaks and Waiting for Guffman. Outside of Ron getting the rights to make a new Monkey Island game, this is about as close to perfect as it gets for fans of classi?c?? Lucasfilm Games.

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