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. 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.īecause 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. 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. It seems to be a murder mystery in which nobody cares about the murder because they're so intent on performing their comedy routines.Īnd then there is an actual comedy routine, delivered in flashback by Ransome the Clown. 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's easy to forget, as all of these daft characters and situations pile up, that Thimbleweed begins with a corpse. 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. A pillow factory, it seems, is funny because pillows are funny and not the sort of thing that impresses anyone in the real world. 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.Ī 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. 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 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. 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. 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.Īttractive as it is, should such pixels please your eye, it's the quality of the story and the puzzles that really count. 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. In Thimbleweed Park, few things are what they appear to be.
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