LinuxGameCast Reviews – Thimbleweed Park

Your intrepid heroes talk to birds, collect dust, and clown around. Thimbleweed Park faces the CHAIRQUISITION!

Game: Thimbleweed Park™
Webzone: https://thimbleweedpark.com/
Devel: Terrible Toybox
Engine: Custom (SDL, C/C++, Squirrel)
Price: 19.99 / CDN 21.99

Wazzat: In Thimbleweed Park, a dead body is the least of your problems. Switch between five playable characters to uncover the surreal secrets of this strange town in a modern mystery adventure game from the creators of Monkey Island and Maniac Mansion. The deeper you go, the weirder it gets.

Disclosure: They made with the keys

CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope

– Not sure if want

– Check it out

– Shutupandtakemymonies

Makes with the working

V-

No major issues.
Quick load times and smooth gameplay.
However, your gerbil lock “safe area” is a bit janky.

J-

P-

If I’m playing a game in fullscreen and you don’t lock my mouse cursor and I end up clicking on youtube videos I didn’t care to watch, you’re gonna get dinged a chair!
Also, I do see why you’d want to limit the FerPS to 60 but how about you do it without VSync’ing?
I don’t like tearing so I’ve taken many steps to ensure it doesn’t happen.
Except, if a game can’t sync to VBlank properly, as is the case, it takes a lot of doing to get rid of the tearing.
The only way I found to do it was to disable the game’s Fullscreen option, use KWin to force the game into a 1080p “fullscreen” window, and disable unredirection in compton.
So that gets you dinged another chair.

Total-

Shiny / Sounds

V-

Simulating screen tear is a nice touch.
It took me a hot second to figure out only parts of the screen were tearing.
Straight up big-head hipster-pixel done right.
Voice acting is done well enough.
Well, minus Ms. Dana Scully on a budget.
I want to believe whoever did that character was being intentionally bad.
Welp, the clown segment sounded like an edited LGC Weekly.
Does Google know you used their ring rang?
It tried to nail 90’s adventure and it did just that, unapologetically.

J-

It definitely looks like a game out of that vintage
The voice acting is decent, but sheriff Ned Flanders is making me want to choke a bitch

P-

They went full on retro with this one.
I’m not entirely sure the different levels of audio compression in the different characters was intentional, to give it that extra feel of “old game”, but that’s definitely something I noticed.
I also appreciated the 1×1 pixel specks of dust you collect. That too was a good call back to the olden times when you needed pixel perfect mouse skills to pick up certain items.

Total-

Control

V-

All of the commands are sprinkled around the WASD area, nice.
Outside of that it’s point-and-click.
No rebindable controls in 2017 gets you nixed a Chair.

J-

The lack of escape button functionality is a bit annoying,but not enough to ding it a chair

P-

Why do you hate the Esc key?
Why do I need to edit a freakin’ Unity-like prefs file to change the hotkeys?
I was also going to point out how much of a dick move it was to not let you scroll your inventory with the mouse-wheel, but the April 4th update did add that functionality.

Total-

FUN

V-

Hard mode can go FK right off.
I tried that for a hot second until I realized I was knee deep in a river of nope.
It’s a clicky adventure game.
You’ve played it before and you will play it again.
The only thing that sets these games apart is their story.
I’m happy to report Thimbleweed Park has a proper one.
Even at the two hour mark I can already see how storylines are starting to intermingle.
And for once, I’m interested to see how it plays out, in casual mode.
Really dig how flashbacks put you in charge of that particular character.
That said, switching between the agents can get a bit tedious.
Goes double for slogging through the dialogue.
On that topic, this game is genually funny.
Yeah, there’s some cringe humour but more often than not the jokes stick the landing.
The puzzles are challenging without being FK you hard in casual mode.
Overall it’s just well done and clear that a lot of love went into its creation.
I’m planning to put some more time into it.

J-

Normally I don’t really care for point and click adventure games
This one isn’t too bad though
The writing is sharp, the gameplay is tolerable, and that’s really all you can ask for when it comes to these
I’m getting to the point though where I’m just randomly clicking things on other things in the hope that something happens.

P-

Regardless of what I say, the moment I mention my score for this category a lot of people are going to hate me.
But I’m nothing if not a glorified exercise in futility in relatively human form.
When I play video games, I do so for the escapism.
I do so to lose myself in a world where I don’t get reminded of how much I suck as a human being.
I do so to vicariously experience a story through the playable characters.
I do so for far too many reasons for me to list, but I can list you a few specific reasons why I don’t play videogames for.
I don’t do it to be reminded I’m playing a videogame, constantly during the first 10 minutes of said game.
I don’t do it to have characters “ironically” referring to my past time as being inferior to doing other stuff.
I don’t do it to test just how far Poe’s Law extends.
I go into all videogames with about as much of an open mind as I can, even though my opinion is always inevitably colored by my own previous experiences.
I didn’t like Thimbleweed Park because it managed to hit all the buttons necessary for me to call it a pretentious nostalgia cash grab made by developers too stuck in the glory days of their past, desperate to prove they and their chosen genre are still relevant.

Total-

Final –