Thimbleweed Park is a game about a murder in a small town. Except it's not, really. That's the catalyst that sets the plot in motion, but it's a red herring. The game tees itself up as a procedural detective game with a vaguely X-Files flavour, but it's not long before you're being dragged down some very surprising rabbit holes by writer/director Ron Gilbert—creator of Monkey Island and other fine point-and-click adventures. Terrible Toybox, Gilbert's studio, recently released the magnificent Return to Monkey Island, reuniting us with Guybrush Threepwood. But Thimbleweed Park, its first game, is a much stranger affair.
FBI agents Ray and Reyes have been sent to the isolated town of Thimbleweed Park to investigate a murder. A corpse has been found rotting under a railway bridge on the outskirts of town, but none of the locals know who the victim is. You're given a list of tasks—locate the murder weapon, identify the body, and so on. But this being a point-and-click adventure in the '90s mould, doing so involves using an inventory stuffed with seemingly useless items to solve some enormously complicated puzzles. You're gonna need a bigger walkthrough.
There are other playable characters too. Ransome is a misanthropic clown with a heroically filthy mouth, cursed never to remove his make-up; Delores is a bookish adventure game designer who's in town to visit her family home; and meek pillow salesman Franklin, her dad, is a ghost trapped in the hotel where he was murdered. It's a motley crew to say the least, and you switch between them frequently. You can swap inventory items between them too, but otherwise they don't interact with each other as much as you might expect.
Brilliantly, Franklin has his own set of ghostly interactions. He can't pick stuff up or open doors, being a spirit and all, but he can chill the air, short electronics, and blow gently on things. This forms the basis of some clever, comical puzzles. But otherwise, this is as standard as adventure games get. You wander around the town, pick up junk, talk to weirdos, and dream up elaborate ways to bypass obstacles and solve problems with all the crap stuffed in your pockets. This is very much a tribute to the brain-mangling adventure games of old.
Thimbleweed Park makes use of the classic Maniac Mansion-style 'verb buffet' point-and-click interface: push, pull, open, close, use, pick up, etc. Each character has their own to-do list, which gives you a vague idea of what you're supposed to be doing, but otherwise there's very little in the way of hints. That initial setup—the body under the bridge and the FBI agents investigating it—isn't as important as you think it's going to be. The story veers off in directions you'd never expect and gets very meta. I won't say any more, but it gets weird, man.
It's a funny game, but in a dry sort of way. It has none of the warmth or pathos of the Monkey Island games, is overly sarcastic, and gets a little carried away with shattering the fourth wall at times. But it's a hell of an adventure game, with a compelling mystery-laden plot that kept me intrigued all the way through. Return to Monkey Island is a more charming, approachable game, and tells a more coherent story. But Thimbleweed Park revels in the dark and surreal in a way Guybrush Threepwood's adventure in the Caribbean never does.
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