KickStarter Thimbleweed Park: A New Ron Gilbert Classic Point & Click Adventure

[mibbles]

Not soon enough. I don't recall when was the last time I felt this excited about a game. I even had a dream about playing it!

 

[bertram_tung]

it's exciting to play the first ron gilbert game after he has come out as a homosexual. should be interesting to see how this affects the themes within his creation

 

[Maxie]

some socially-inclined woman with a crazy look in her eyes thanked him for making the Swordmaster of Melee Island a woman and asked whether he always keeps in mind social narrative as he designs games

Gilbert replied that some woman working at LucasArts really liked Monkey Island swordfighting so they just used her face and name for the Swordmaster for fun

 

[Infinitron]

http://us15.campaign-archive2.com/?u=81be3444a91ce55febff66ac1&id=dba028c970&e=08ec8d86f3

Thimbleweed Park launching this week!

International Thimbleweed Park Launch Week!
It’s Thimbleweed Park Launch Week! YAY! There will be much rejoicing! ... or else...

We’re launching on the 30th!!!! So what should you expect? Lots of awesome stuff!

Go Time
On Thursday, launch day, we’ll be hitting “publish” buttons around:

9am PDT 30th March (West Coast USA
12pm EDT 30th March (East Coast USA)
5pm BST 30th March (UK)
6pm CEST 30th March (Europe)
3am AEDT 31st March (East Coast Australia)
At that point the game will be available for people to buy on Steam, GOG, Xbox Live, and the Mac App Store for $19.99.

If your pledge includes a digital copy of the game, you’ll get a Steam key! You can redeem your code for a PC, Mac, or Linux version of the game.

Once we hit those launch buttons, you can go to PledgeManager and find your Steam key. You'll also get an email with details, but due to the volume of emails going out, this could take several hours. If you don't want to wait for the email, head to PledgeManager at launch time and log in to your account:

https://terribletoybox.pledgemanager.com/projects/thimbleweed-park-ks/
Prepare your PledgeManager Account for Launch
To prepare yourself for our launch and have minimal delays… Please check now to make sure you can log into your PledgeManager account.

According to our records, your account is set as “completed”. So you’re good to go! You can sanity check to make sure you can log in, but otherwise you don’t need to do anything.

If you can’t get access to your PledgeManager account, please email support@thimbleweedpark.com and let us know what email address you used to back Thimbleweed Park. We’ll do our best to get you access as soon as possible.

If your PledgeManager account says you still owe money, but you paid via PayPal. It could be you were affected by a known issue we had. Please get in touch with support@thimbleweedpark.com immediately and we’ll investigate.

Other Platforms
The game will also be on Xbox Live and the Mac App Store. If you want to have the game on these platforms, you must buy it separately. They are not covered under the Kickstarter. Note: these versions were not paid for with any Kickstarter money.

We will be releasing on iOS and Android in the coming months. We might also release on other consoles and other platforms later, but we make no guarantees. If you are interested in other platforms, you should keep an eye on our Twitter or blog or Facebook.

More Rewards

DRM-Free Version
If you want a GOG (DRM-free) version of the game instead of a Steam version, please sign up on this Google form here: https://goo.gl/forms/wzACRomlGvd1swCJ3 We’ll work out the best way to get you your key quickly. If you want a Steam key, you do not need to fill out that form.

Soundtrack
If your pledge level includes the soundtrack, you’ll also get a code in PledgeManager to download the soundtrack from Bandcamp on launch day.

Physical Rewards
If your pledge includes physical rewards, we’ll be working on getting them to you as soon as possible. Expect that it will be at least a few months before we get them finalised, ordered and shipped to you.

 

[MRY]

Anyone know when the review embargo lifts? [EDIT: A quick Google confirms reviews embargoed till release day.]

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.kickstarter.com/project...new-classic-point-and-click-adv/posts/1843088

Be on the lookout for an email!

Thimbleweed Park is launching on the 30th!

We just sent out an email to all the backers who will be getting a copy of the game with instructions to assure you can play Thimbleweed Park the moment it's out.

Be on the look out for that email.

If you didn't get the email, check your spam filter, check the Promotions tab in Gmail, and if it's still not there, email support@thimbleweedpark.com

And the price will be $19.99*.

* The price for the game, not the price to email support.

- Ron

 

[LESS T_T]

But also see what he did in dev blog: https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/soon_is_soon

We've also set the price of the game at $19.99 on all launch platforms.

 

[HoboForEternity]

i want to d1p it, but i have to wait for my credit card's statement in 4th of april so the purchase goes to next month's bill. mine this month is scarily close to the limit already

 

[Bumvelcrow]

mine this month is scarily close to the limit already

Looking forward to the ME: Andromeda LP.

 

[Don Peste]

Any chance of some kind of retail collector's edition?

 

[HoboForEternity]

mine this month is scarily close to the limit already

Looking forward to the ME: Andromeda LP.

gross. no. spent my money on nier automata and styx, and some other life related stuff. oh and alcohol

 

[evdk]

people who wear hats like that are terrible

people who wear hats like this usually bother me for spare change

You do know this is a Kickstarter thread, right?

 

[Astral Rag]

Released!!!!!​

 

[Infinitron]

http://store.steampowered.com/app/569860/
https://af.gog.com/game/thimbleweed_park?as=1649904300

 

[MRY]

Pretty strong reviews. Main complaints seem to be "why is there a puzzle in my adventure game?" variety.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

Here's an adequate video review I found for those pesky unconvinced heathens:

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/03/30/thimbleweed-park-review/

Wot I Think: Thimbleweed Park
Adam Smith on March 30th, 2017 at 5:00 pm.

In Thimbleweed Park [official site], few things are what they appear to be. The game, which reunites Ron Gilbert with his Maniac Mansion co-designer Gary Winnick, is a point and click comedy-mystery that looks like a relic from the past. Or, more accurately, like memories of the past; it has handsome lighting and a level of visual detail that actually fills in the blanks that memory often papers over.

Attractive as it is, should such pixels please your eye, it’s the quality of the story and the puzzles that really count. On one of those fronts, Thimbleweed eventually finds a way to go above and beyond anything I expected from it, but the combination of broad jokes and mystery-thriller sometimes creates confusion and frustration in both the narrative and the puzzling along the road.

The first hour or two were equal parts a pleasant return to the comfort zone of point and click puzzling, and a sense that things were just a little too comfortable in Thimbleweed Park. The writing, in those early stages, has to do a lot of work, introducing lots of characters (five of them playable, eventually) and fleshing out the backstory of the town. The setting seemed muddled, with references to an all-powerful pillow factory magnate and ever-present vacuum tubes running everything from the crime-solving computers in the sheriff’s offices to the telephones and fire hydrants.

A town with a pillow factory as its most magnificent achievement, inspiring awe in the residents, falls dangerously close to precisely the kind of zany humour that makes me cringe. A pillow factory, it seems, is funny because pillows are funny and not the sort of thing that impresses anyone in the real world. And two of the first characters you meet, the sheriff and coroner, share a similar sprite and the same voice actor using a different comedy speech pattern for each. It’s oh so wacky.

It’s easy to forget, as all of these daft characters and situations pile up, that Thimbleweed begins with a corpse. The sinister and mysterious aspects are quickly buried underneath a deluge of daft references and conversations that meander without doing very much to build the world, establish interesting characters or elaborate on the strong opening mystery. It seems to be a murder mystery in which nobody cares about the murder because they’re so intent on performing their comedy routines.

And then there is an actual comedy routine, delivered in flashback by Ransome the Clown. I’ve written about Ransome before and I’m pleased to report that he continues to be a horrible delight right up until Thimbleweed’s final moments, but it’s his first appearance in that flashback that stabilised the game for me. Partly, it’s because Ransome is an easy character to understand – a jerk who gets his comeuppance – but it’s mostly because the flashback is a self-contained setting that allows the story to find its focus.

Because Thimbleweed quickly opens up, allowing any character to go to (almost) any location, the story isn’t told as efficiently as it could be were the structure more linear. To begin with you have just two characters to control, but they’re interchangeable, with one unifying motive and objective, and their own ulterior motives that remain hidden in the early stages. The three flashbacks, each of which introduces a new playable character, are useful anchors or punctuation, breaking the game into more manageable slices.

It’s odd to think of pacing as a problem in a point and click game, but more than anything else that’s what I struggled with in the opening hours. My interest was in solving a murder, but the game’s interest was in explaining exactly what Thimbleweed park is, from the pillow factory to the occult bookstore to the haunted hotel. It’s a complex place and not all of the individual parts and people gel together to give a sense of precisely why it is such a strange little ghost town.

That all settles down though and even if the bigger questions are left dangling until the final chapters, the town does start to cohere. It’s an odd place but its oddities – even the pillow factory and those vacuum tubes – are more than throwaway jokes or convenient and welcome puzzling short-hand (the tubes become a shortcut for many tasks that require a device to be repaired, so you don’t need to worry about carrying all manner of tools around).

There are throwaway jokes everywhere though and even the ones that got a laugh out of me sometimes felt like a distraction from the actual mystery portion of the game. Where the comedy and mystery elements are intertwined, they work fantastically well, and the humour doesn’t shy away from the story’s darker threads. Curses, death, loss, murder, families torn apart, anxiety, despair – individual lines and scenes are cheery and light-hearted, but the overall tone is rarely frivolous.

But Gilbert and his team have other plates to spin: Kickstarter rewards in the form of answering machine messages (and a stacked phonebook of names and numbers corresponding to them) and library books, and more in-jokes and callbacks than comfortably fit within the framework of the story. When you’re searching for a clue to advance the case, all of those names, numbers and allusions become an extra layer of noise to navigate.

Is a number mentioned in a journal actually important or is it a pop culture reference? Is a witty line about the idiosyncracies of point and click adventures actually a hint about the conventions and how to break them, or simply…a witty line? It can be hard to cut through the sheer volume of asides and one-liners to find the clues that actually matter. To be clear, this isn’t a problem throughout the entire game, but one of the lead characters is an adventure game designer and an important location contains a Comic Con style ThimbleCon; that character and setting occasionally turn the volume up to eleven, though Delores (the game designer) swiftly became my favouite person in Thimbleweed. But, still, I never want to hear another line about the shame of working in the games industry. In my chosen, that’s unlikely.

Almost as soon as all of the characters were in play and the whole of Thimbleweed County was open for exploration, I settled into the game’s groove. Pacing was no longer a problem because I almost always had two or three major puzzles to chip away at, meaning I could turn away from one and to another if I got stuck. Eventually, of course, you hit bottlenecks, having solved all but one puzzle that will advance the story, but despite all of the distractions mentioned above, the world does have a strange but consistent logic. There wasn’t a single solution that felt unjustified and the couple of times I resorted to trial and error, the way forward I eventually stumbled across always made sense in retrospect.

And when the characters are allowed to show their personalities and their past rather than acting as vessels for joke-delivery, they’re a fascinating bunch, with excellent voice acting. I particularly like Ray and Reyes, the agents. Ray rolls her eyes and treats Thimbleweed’s silliness with utter disdain – a much-needed voice of caustic reason – and Reyes is nervous and naive in a way that immediately made me suspicious. Everyone in Thimbleweed is an unreliable narrator and even though you’re controlling these people, you aren’t actually being them; their secrets remain their own, until they choose to reveal them.

I could quibble (am am going to, clearly) about how the player characters don’t actually speak to one another, except on are scripted occasions, and can’t share information effectively. How Delores can give Reyes an item that helps to resolve his entire storyline but that he is oblivious to it. How I never want to ride an elevator again because the wait between floors feels eternal when you’re struggling to figure out a puzzle. How some of the actual rules of being a ghost don’t seem entirely consistent. I’ve made notes about so many things that made me frown, but they don’t add up to more than one big frown, and it’s countered by the much bigger grin I had for the back half of the game (it took me sixteen hours to finish and I only got properly stuck a couple of times).

This has been a tricky review to write because some of the things that I love about Thimbleweed will almost certainly be off-putting to other people, and some parts that fell flat might well be your favourite moments. It’s a dense game, which means that if one joke fails to land, there’s almost certainly a follow-up that just might, hot on its heels. The bigger picture – which I’m unwilling to reveal because this begins as a whodunnit but eventually becomes a whatisit – ties everything together, making a tidy package of all the loose threads and awkward gags.

I thoroughly enjoyed most of the journey, despite a few unhappy detours, but the ending brought everything together in a way that didn’t just resolve the characters’ individual stories in a satisfying way, but found the emotional beat at the heart of their investigations. Not in every case, but certainly with three of the five. Though it rushes to its conclusion once the cat is out of the bag and I was a little let-down by the way smaller mysteries are absorbed into the Big Question raised in the final act (though hinted at previously), Thimbleweed’s final moments made me sad to say goodbye. Properly sad, with the suggestion of a little sniffle and everything. I suspect that ending will be divisive. Some people will make like Ray and roll their eyes.

By the end, all of my earlier frustrations didn’t seem to matter, though it’s important to remember that they absolutely did at times during the hours I was playing, and if I was disappointed at all it was because Thimbleweed Park doesn’t pack more emotional punches into its running time. As the individual stories play out, Ransome and Delores in particular show that Gilbert and his team care for their characters and their disappointments. This is more recognisably the work of writers who showed empathy for Guybrush and Elaine and their dreams than the people who brought us insult swordfighting.

At the beginning of the game, I’d hoped to solve a mystery and have a few laughs, but now I miss the company of this little crew. It’s a smart game though and a thoughtful one, even if it sometimes hides those qualities behind its clown makeup and a beaglepuss. The final puzzle sequence in particular shows just how long a game Terrible Toybox have been playing with the design. It’s a callback that works as more than a joke. At their worst, the many adventure game references feel almost apologetic, as if the game isn’t entirely confident in its own skin, but as it moves toward an ending, it embraces its own oddities and past in a way that left me entirely satisfied.

And for all of that that, I can forgive a few too-vague clues and the jokes that fell flat. It’s a beautiful game as well, the non-interactive foregrounds adding as much life to the world as the backgrounds. Even the old-school verb system, which I was wary of, doesn’t get in the way, with a right click always picking the most sensible options, and others existing for laughs or mild experimentation. Oh, and before I leave you, one piece of advice that might save you some time: as soon as one character has a map, the rest can collect one from an obvious place. Don’t do what I did and spend precious time sprint-clicking around the world.

Thimbleweed Park is out now, for Windows, Mac and Linux, and is $19.99 (US) via Steam and GOG.

 

[Crooked Bee]

Press release:

Thimbleweed Park is out today! See below for the official press release straight from the town where a dead body is the least of your problems.

• Launch trailer (Vimeo): https://vimeo.com/210346524
• Launch trailer (YouTube): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HcoXpDNwBA&
• Screenshots and other assets: http://www.thimbleweedpark.com/presskit

This mystery adventure game is a $19.99 download from Steam, GOG, Xbox One, and the Mac App Store. It has English voice acting with English, German, French, Spanish, and Italian subtitles. Russian subtitles will be added soon in a free update. Also available:

• Soundtrack composed by Steve Kirk: https://thimbleweedpark.bandcamp.com/album/thimbleweed-park-original-soundtrack
• Thimbleweed Park merch (new items coming this week): https://www.fangamer.com/collections/thimbleweed-park

Since it began as a Kickstarter campaign in November 2014, Thimbleweed Park's development has been an amazing experience for all involved. We hope you love it as much as we've loved making it.

Crowdfunded Thimbleweed Park Murder Investigation to be Closed Unsolved
Sheriff tells amateur investigators to leave town: "There's nothing-a-reno to see here."

THIMBLEWEED PARK - March 30, 1987 - The Thimbleweed Park Sheriff has formally closed the ongoing investigation into the dead body under the bridge citing lack of evidence, dwindling interest, and a desire to get home by 8:00pm to watch wrestling.

The murder victim is believed to be a European visitor with no ties to the local community. The unsolved murder is the latest in a series of suspicious events that include the sudden death of town founder Chuck Edmund and the mysterious disappearance of his brother, Franklin.

In the course of the investigation, the Thimbleweed Park Sheriff's Department raised suspicions about two uninvited federal agents, disgraced entertainer Ransome the Clown, and pillow factory heiress Delores Edmund. Though their involvement has not been definitively ruled out, the Sheriff today insisted he sees no reason to waste further resources on a "dead-end-a-reno case."

"Dead body? What dead body?" the Sheriff blurted when pressed for comment, conspicuously looking over his shoulder.

Game developers Ron Gilbert, Gary Winnick, and David Fox, who have been camping out in Thimbleweed Park since the body was found, are questioning the Sheriff's motives. "This town is hiding a secret, a big one. When we came close to uncovering it, that's when the locals stopped cooperating," Fox said from the show floor at ThimbleCon '87, which is taking place this weekend at the Edmund Hotel.

"We thought raising funds on Kickstarter and embedding ourselves in Thimbleweed Park would give us answers. But two years later, we're only left with more questions," added Winnick. "Why are the signals so strong out here? How come the phone book has 3,000 names in a town with only 80 people? None of these nutjobs even care about the dead body!"

With officials stonewalling the murder investigation and the crowdfunded project drawing to a close, the developers of the Thimbleweed Park video game are now appealing to more than 18,000 backers, as well as countless others who are intrigued by the strange happenings in Thimbleweed Park, to take over.

"Gary, David, and I have spent two years of our *beeping* lives trying to get to the bottom of this," said Ron 'Grumpy Gamer' Gilbert. "You want to know what's going on with the dead body? You want the truth about Thimbleweed Park? Then get down here and start pointing and clicking. This game isn't going to play itself."

To participate in the Thimbleweed Park murder investigation, visit Steam, GOG, Xbox One, or the Mac App Store today. More details can be found at http://www.thimbleweedpark.com.

 

[Infinitron]

http://www.pcgamer.com/thimbleweed-park-review/

THIMBLEWEED PARK REVIEW

Federal agents Ray and Reyes are investigating a murder in the remote rural town of Thimbleweed Park. A body was found under a bridge on the edge of town, but none of the locals seem to know anything about it or who the victim is. The agents have a checklist of tasks they have to complete to crack the case, including identifying the body and finding the murder weapon. But fingering the killer won’t be easy, because this is a point-and-click adventure game.

One of the first puzzles is taking a photo of the body, which is an introduction to the concept of switching characters and swapping items between them. Ray has a camera and Reyes has the film. You get the idea. But this gentle start soon gives way to the complex, elaborate puzzle chains the genre is famous (or perhaps infamous) for.

If you’ve ever wondered if it was possible to solve a homicide with a chainsaw, some sticky tape, and a coin, you’re about to find out. But don’t start thinking about the ways those items could be combined. Untangling a single problem can span several hours in Thimbleweed Park, and all of these objects are small pieces on opposite ends of a huge, elaborate jigsaw puzzle.

There are other playable characters. Ransome is a foul-mouthed clown living a lonely life in an abandoned circus after being cursed never to remove his makeup. Delores is a game designer who returns home to Thimbleweed Park following the death of her uncle. And meek pillow salesman Franklin, Delores’ father, is a ghost trapped in the hotel where he was killed.

The game uses a Monkey Island-style verb buffet: use, give, pick up, push, etc. But, brilliantly, Franklin has his own set of ghostly verbs, including moan, wail, and despair. He can’t touch anything, because he’s dead, but you can interact with the world by chilling the air, blowing on things, and zapping electronics. This forms the basis of some clever puzzles, and playing as Franklin is a nice change of pace from the more traditional pointing and clicking.

Each character has a lengthy to-do list in their inventory, which gives you direction without being too explicit. There’s no hint system of any kind, but speaking to people and inspecting items in your inventory is often enough to fire a synapse and steer you towards a solution. The game strikes a delicate balance between giving you subtle clues and steadfastly refusing to help you in any way, which makes solving a particularly tricky puzzle enormously satisfying. You feel like you’ve earned every victory.

You will get stuck, of course. But the game’s open structure meant I encountered no genuine brick walls in the 16 hours it took me to finish it. You can explore the town and the surrounding county (including the hotel and circus) freely, eventually unlocking a map that lets you travel between locations almost instantly. This means that if one puzzle has you utterly stumped, you can always go and attempt another one somewhere else. I found that distancing myself from a puzzle was often the best way to solve it.

But with five playable characters, four of whom have inventories stuffed with items, including many that don’t actually do anything, the game can occasionally be overwhelming. Sometimes I felt like I was fumbling around in the dark, hopelessly combining random items and trying every possible verb on every object I could find. But I always managed to claw my way out of these puzzle holes eventually, and the satisfaction of doing so ultimately made all the head-scratching and swearing under my breath worth it.

Adventure game logic’ has become something of a derogatory term, but I was glad to discover that Thimbleweed Park’s puzzle solutions rarely require the absurd leaps of logic that would have you dialling the LucasArts hint line in the ‘90s. There are a couple of eyebrow-raisers, but it wouldn’t be an adventure game without them. The important thing is that it never feels like it’s being deliberately obscure just to make your life needlessly difficult.

Humour is the glue that holds everything together in adventure games, and while Thimbleweed Park is funny, I found that it lacks some of the warmth and charm of games like Monkey Island. It’s overly self-referential at times, clumsily bulldozing the fourth wall, and relies a little too much on sarcasm over actual jokes. But a cast of weird, colourful characters, witty dialogue, and a compelling central mystery kept me interested all the way through.

It's a game that dips into the past, but doesn’t use it as a crutch, managing to capture the essence of classic adventures while avoiding some of the things that made them frustrating. I would have liked to see more of a connection between the characters, who never really interact other than to swap items. And sometimes the story gets a little too meta for its own good. But otherwise this is one of the best modern point-and-click adventures on PC.

THE VERDICT
84

THIMBLEWEED PARK
A quality adventure game with challenging puzzles, oddball characters, and an intriguing, mystery-laden plot.

 

[mibbles]

Currently installing.

 

[udm]

I regret not backing this shit for the physical products

 

[Bumvelcrow]

I have it in my 'virtual' hands. Hope this washes away the bad taste of Broken Age.

 

[Crooked Bee]

Lies and slander.

 

[ghostdog]

 

[MRY]

Don't believe the pigeon.