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.
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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 –