![]() No wonder Ransome is messed up, can you imagine living here? ![]() Then it’s time for Delores, the niece of local genius inventor and saviour, the late Chuck Edmund, owner of Pillowtronics and creator of all machines in town and their wondrous Vacuum Tube technology. Soon your investigation leads you to Ransome, a flashback to his story and a new character to control. You’re sure they’re the same person but everyone in town thinks differently, so maybe you’re wrong? I leave that up to you. You first meet the sheriff and the coroner, identical men with annoying verbal tics. Thimbleweed Park begins with a murder, a body left in a puddle down by the bridge out of town, the body so long gone it’s starting to pixelate-their words not mine. It lives up to its name, it’s truly hardcore. Perhaps in the easier mode these things have clearer signposts, but in the hard mode, you’re on your own. I was certainly the source for a lot of frustration, particularly because many of these puzzles belong in the book of Ron Gilbert’s greatest hits, such as a forest maze where you must find a way to track people to the right spot. As I said, don’t know if it’s good or bad. What sometimes made things difficult for me, and it’s something I’m not sure is good or bad, is that you never know if you’ll be able to advance a character’s plot in each chapter, so you might spend hours trying to solve the puzzles that will progress Ransome’s story in a chapter where it’s impossible to do so, when you should focus on two of the other characters first.Īs Thimbleweed Park’s areas open, more puzzles become available, though you don’t ever know if they’re solvable in the given chapter, or if the conditions for their solution only become available in another. From the pixelation, he’s been dead a while Doesn’t mean it doesn’t get frustrating at times. This includes sharing items and using their own special circumstances to open paths closed to others. The other reason is that much like Maniac Mansion, this is a single-player cooperative game, meaning that characters must cooperate to solve puzzles and advance through the game’s chapters. Sometimes it was because the solution was mildly obtuse, such as using an open flame for a task my logic said I could carry out with about a dozen different ways, other times it was because of the annoyingly large number of red herrings this game has, such as the hoard of items you can pick up but have no purpose, just filling up your inventory and as they did with me, add in the confusion to a puzzle’s solution.īut mostly it was because the puzzles are difficult, the clues there but given ever so subtly, such as an off-hand comment by a character. In playing for this review I spent days locked in a single chapter because I couldn’t figure out what to do. I’ve complained for years of how easy puzzles have become in adventure games and Thimbleweed Park nearly broke me. I thought I was ready, that I knew how Gilbert and his cohorts thought and how they designed their puzzles, but I was so wrong and in a very good way. When I launched Thimbleweed Park, I chose the hard mode, which had all the puzzles, bringing the game to its true difficulty setting. I know who Ron Gilbert is and I know his brand of puzzle design. ![]() I did play the Monkey Island series of course and the second instalment is one of my favourite LucasArts games. At the time, I didn’t really understand point & click adventure games (I was 7) and controlling a cursor using an NES gamepad was beyond me. It sounds like Twin Peaks, but it’s even more bizarre, it’s Thimbleweed Park. A corpse, Feds, a cantankerous foul-mouthed clown, a game dev, a strange town with strange people and a case to solve. ![]()
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