Thimbleweed Park™

Every market we collect.

Hours played at review time, across 96 reviews with recorded playtime.

positive critical· bar length = how often the theme comes up

A Maniac Mansion like modern adventure game. Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick came back with this highly hyped game. It's full of nostalgia and a fresh approach for most of the time. 90% of the game is inspired directly by Maniac Mansion, big head characters, breaking the 4th wall, multiple playable characters each one with their own inventory, even the original Maniac Mansion mansion is here and is a big part of the game. The game starts with a murder mystery in this little town with wacky characters. Most of the first part of the game is getting to meet everyone and start to understand what is going on. There are 9 parts (not 4 like classic Monkey Island games) that are loosely based on specific actions since some parts overlap with puzzles from the other. Some of these parts are just small gags or dialogue scenes so the game length is not as huge as one might think, but it will take some good time to beat. Thimbleweed Park is a tough adventure for newcomers. Luckily it includes a casual mode that removes most of the hardest puzzles or just skips elements in the puzzle chain. It's exactly how it works in Monkey Island 2 and Curse of Monkey Island. The plot is exactly the same, but you will miss entire locations and some of the most interesting sections. It's a love letter to old adventures and to adventure players. The amount of content related to Kickstarters must be a Record Guiness. There's a huge library with books written by fans, hundreds and hundreds of books. Then there's the thousands of telephone answering machine messages recorded by kickstarters. Even items are named after some of the fans. It gets a little weird after a while, it's like you are playing on a museum. Unfortunately the game is not perfect, there's too many playable characters with no real playability differences. Expect to have almost repeated conversations with NPCs with any of these characters. There's also no fast way to trade items between characters, you have to be on the same room and manually give the objects. At one point, you gain access to a wider area, but the game won't indicate that you can have a quick travel item for all of your characters. All these design choices make the game a little cumbersome, specially with the amount of nonsensical items and difficulty of the puzzles. Music and sound effects are nice, not memorable. I was expecting a classic LucasArts OST quality, but this music is mostly background and moody, not much else. Voice acting on the other hand is superb, every character has a very fitting voice with highlights being the two main detectives, Ransome the clown and the sheriff/coroner/hotel manager. Lastly, and without spoiliing, the game has some questionable choices close to the end. The main plot is almost forgotten and some of the twists remind of other controversial endings in LucasArts games. It's still a recommended game, not the masterpiece I expected, but quite good.