Reader reviews for Thimbleweed Park

The plot is intriguing and intricate, with lots of unexpected twists and branches, and some genuinely great comedy. There aren’t many point and click adventure games that can pull off such complex and engaging levels of writing.

Unlike most modern day point and click adventures, Thimbleweed Park doesn’t fall back on reams of exposition and waffling dialogue. It puts the focus on the puzzles, which makes this game particularly fun to play. The puzzles are challenging without being frustrating and ultimately very satisfying to solve.

As much as I enjoyed Return to Monkey Island, I don’t consider it on the same level as Monkey Island 1 or 2, Sam and Max or Day of the Tentacle. Thimbleweed Park, on the other hand, is definitely up there: a timeless classic and a masterclass in the art point and click gaming.

A friend who backed Thimbleweed Park recommended it to me as one of the greatest games ever made, so I decided to check it out.

I liked the pixel arts, but the chaotic gameplay, the muddled story and the complete relatable characters led me uninstall the game after a couple of hours.

Maybe the ambition to be funny (in a teenage movie kind of way) gets in the way of telling a meaningful story, and I found the characters annoying, one-dimensional and boring.

I’m not a fan of Monkey Island and the cult around Lucas Arts games (the only one I could ever be bothered to finish was The Dig), so having dialog options about them did not add to the game for me.

What really gets me is that I could have known all this before. It was in the reviews. It was clear from the way the game was described on GOG. I decided to ignore this, because I wanted to like it. My own fault entirely. I could have read the sings.

Good:
- Great graphics, i’m a sucker for pixels.
- Great voiceacting
- Retro text option!
- Love the “normal/hard” choice!
- Some fun eastereggs for the more veteran adventure players

Bad :
- You could solve puzzles and acquire items that you don’t need at that point in the story which creates a chaotic gameplay. Also the check list is a really bad help tool when you are stuck in the game as some quests can only be done in a different chapter or end of the game (e.g: dad’s redemption, fingerprint chuck,etc..). Also some illogical puzzles and bugs.

- The dialog options are sometimes over the top. I always cringed when they talked about adventure games/Lucasarts.

- What’s up with the story? I had the impression the murder story didn’t pan out so they went all matrix which failed horribly! I mean they could’ve implented it much better in the story, but instead it made every chapter pretty much pointless.

- Terrible locations. All dead. The music doesn’t help either. The map you use to travel around is horribly made, it looks like it was made in MS Paint.  Oh yes, they used the empty dead locations as part of the storyline..yeah right, they probably ran out of money/time.

- Uninteresting characters. Everyone in town was so bland.  The playable characters too except maybe Ransome and Delores.

Conclusion : The story really bombed. The puzzles are decent. The characters are boring. It is still worth it? No, i say skip it and go play Monkey Island 2.