[esperent]

I've been playing Thimbleweed Park on Android recently. In general I do love point and click puzzle games but my feelings on this one are very mixed.

* The writing is hit or miss

* The story is just serviceable

* Only about 20% of the jokes land for me

* The constant 4th wall breaking is just bad

And then there's the puzzles. Maybe I made a mistake in selecting hard mode at the start but it's got the worst of the genre's "what the hell" moments... And it's really long. About halfway through I started using a guide and for the majority of the latter game puzzles, there's no logic to solving them so you'd have to resort to clicking everything and with 5 playable characters, about 40 things in my inventory (most of which can be given to other characters) by the end game and 30 or more locations, there's just too much.

I'm going to finish this - probably today actually, I'm right at the end - but I'm not finishing it by feeling excited for the second one.

By contrast I replayed the broken sword games last year and while they show their age and have plenty of what the hell moments, a big difference is that I cared about the story and characters while playing. George and Nico are funny, dumb, endearing. I don't feel that way about anything or anyone in Thimbleweed Park.

[arexxbifs]

I played it when it was released and mostly enjoyed it, though I can't remember what difficulty setting I picked. I bought it mostly because I like Mark Ferrari's art, but ended up completing it. Some characters and jokes were intensely annoying, especially Ransome. I did like Delores, though.

Afterwards, I revisited some LucasArts games I'd played before (Monkey Island 1 and 2), and tried my hand with some I hadn't (Fate of Atlantis, Sam'n'Max, Full Throttle and also Flight of the Amazon Queen, which isn't from LucasArts). I think what you describe is actually fairly representative of the overall LucasArts experience. Character building is limited, even the funny jokes get tiresome after you've clicked through them a fifth time, some puzzles are illogical even for games with a sillier tone (monkey wrench, anyone?), and there's often a lot of walking about, repeating conversations, and clicking randomly just to see what happens. Some of them (Thimbleweed Park, MI2) also have exceptionally poor endings.

Out of the games I played, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis was the best, though I got stuck (by forgetting some object in a room outside a complex labyrinth) close to the end and didn't bother completing it. The main character is pre-established, the plot feels like an Indy movie, and I can't recall any genuinely preposterous puzzle solutions (though it was a few years ago now).

I love the Monkey Island games, they're a part of my childhood. But I mostly love them for the music and graphics, not necessarily for the puzzles or the many gags that other people always seem to find a lot funnier than I do.

[jerf]

The Sam and Max episodes were pretty good... partially because the episodic format forced the designers to keep things reeled in. A single 3 hour episode can't get to the point that you have a couple hundred possible solutions to the problem and nothing but brute force to resolve it.

This style of game died for a reason. I'm not saying it needs to stay dead, but I do think every entrant to the genre needs to grapple with those reasons and have an answer to them. The episodic format provided one decent answer, even if I don't necessarily love it as a monetization technique. Adventure games all tend to pass through episode-like gates anyhow because the combinatorial state space becomes overwhelming without them, but they often still carry over state from the previous phases of the game. The full clean-slate wipe of the episodes prevented that from becoming a problem.

[RajT88]

> Fate of Atlantis was the best

A better Indy movie than the last 2, IMO. I go back and replay it every so often.

> The Sam and Max episodes were pretty good

Some of them were funnier than others. It helps if you were attached to the characters having read the comics or watched the show. (The comics had the most concentrated humor - see: the comic about Dracula)

I recall the episode featuring the Abraham Lincoln statue running amok was very funny.

[CalRobert]

Adventure games can have amazing stories - I still think Star Trek: A Final Unity could be a great movie, or novel even.

[unixhero]

I have to finish that. Thanks for reminding me.

[apples_oranges]

People keep saying that about Atlantis but why can’t the game be enough without a movie remake .. don’t you all want new stories? Isn’t that why Disney star wars sucks?

[RajT88]

Well... We got new stories with Indy and they were less good. lol

[pennomi]

What these games need is a good old-fashioned Aperture Science Material Emancipation Grill.

(Though I guess in the context of these games, that would be considered new-fangled.)

[aleph_minus_one]

> What these games need is a good old-fashioned Aperture Science Material Emancipation Grill.

For those who are out of the loop:

> https://half-life.fandom.com/wiki/Aperture_Science_Material_...

[awakeasleep]

They need an editor who will go through and identify the puzzles that must be solved through brute force, and require alteration.

[aleph_minus_one]

> They need an editor who will go through and identify the puzzles that must be solved through brute force

Barely any adventure game has a puzzle that requires brute-forcing. The problem is rather that sometimes players don't have the same kind of thinking as the developers.

This issue can be aggravated if the player comes from a different culture or is playing a translated version of the game; for a famous example: the "monkey wrench" puzzle only works if the player is used the the US-American English name of the respective tool.

[Arainach]

"read the author's mind" is a puzzle type closely related to, and in practice often overlapping with brute force.

If the author has a solution in mind but it is not properly hinted, for most players brute force is the only option. In the case of point and click adventure games, if you don't think "I could stick the bubble gum to the mouse to run through the wall and grab the key" you are left trying every combination of item and action, which isn't fun.

[darkwater]

This style of game died because the median attention span across the population decreased over the last 2 decades and something. I don't see a problem in getting blocked and try to brute force your way out of it. Games should be fun but this trend to have perfect, non frustrating gameplay 100% of the time is also part of the problem, IMO.

And now, I'll go back yelling at some cloud.

[Arainach]

I disagree. I write and play in long-form puzzle competitions, so for many people I know attention span isn't the issue. What is the issue is that writing fun puzzles is a skill. A totally different skill from designing or implementing video games.

Anyone can design a hard puzzle. Guess the number in my head. Unscramble this 200-character anagram.

The real magic is in the "Aha!" moments where the solver makes a connection and is able to proceed. Great puzzles are supposed to make the player feel like they are smart, not that the author is smart.

Many point and click games fall apart here. Brute force isn't fun. Games where you think you'll need something in the future but the game won't let you take it now just so you'll have to backtrack when the game wants you to do that aren't fun.

A lot of modern point and clicks are by people who don't understand that and think suffering and click mashing are the point. I don't remember much of playing Thimbleweed Park, but VirtuaVerse was very much that.

[amiga386]

The canonical criticism is Old Man Murray's Death of Adventure Games describing one mad puzzle in Gabriel Knight 3 (1999) with an improbable solution which admits no simpler or more logical solutions. Not to pick on it, because the adventure game market had been making more and more convoluted puzzles and reached peak idiocy some time ago.

https://oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html

> Who killed Adventure Games? I think it should be pretty clear at this point that Adventure Games committed suicide.

What I quite like in Joe Richardson's Death of the Reprobate is that Joe breaks the fourth wall and admonishes the player character for feeling sad that Joe told him the puzzle solution and robbed him of a "Eureka moment". "IF THE PUZZLE DIFFICULTY IS PITCHED JUST RIGHT, THAT'S MY TRIUMPH, NOT YOURS" says Joe.

[alberto-m]

Graphic adventures ceased to be popular before YouTube and smartphones started to damage the average capability to focus. The famous post https://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html illustrates how the genre became too contrived and self-referential (even poking fun at those who blame “television-atrophied attention spans”).

But the rest of your point stands. I keep reading young gamers complaining about adventures and role-playing games being “too difficult” whenever they don't put big flashing arrows on the next character or place to interact with. I cannot understand that: if one can solve a puzzle without grit, what pleasure does that bring? It's the same as watching TV.

[jerf]

Very much agree.

I'd also observe that "brute force" here is an O(source * target) problem, where a source/target pair is some expressible command. e.g., you can't usually combine two locations on the screen, but you can try to combine any item with any screen location, and in some games, any item with any item. Some games add a term for "verb" to that as well, though most games nowadays wisely realize that's not really helpful.

You can see the core reason why people complain about "moon logic" isn't really that the logic is weird. I don't think that specifically bothers too many people. Often it's part of the fun in a way. The problem with "moon logic" is that it means I can't cut down on that search space with common sense or clever-but-grounded logic. In reality rubbing my cat with a piece of tape to pull some hair off of it so that I can wear that tape as a fake mustache is not a sensible option to consider, which is a real part of a real puzzle [1], not just something I made up. A game that consider that a solution to a problem is a game I have to rub everything on everything and it is not just "gamers being lazy" that they don't want to perform hundreds or thousands of possible actions, where all but one of them will result in failure, and depending on the game, some of them may even result in "game over". That's terrible design and that's not the player's fault.

[1]: The classic Old Man Murray article, for today's 10,000: https://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/78.html The rest of the puzzle isn't exactly a tour de force of logic either.

[darkwater]

> Graphic adventures ceased to be popular before YouTube and smartphones started to damage the average capability to focus. The famous post https://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html illustrates how the genre became too contrived and self-referential (even poking fun at those who blame “television-atrophied attention spans”).

Partially agree, but I also think that they were victims of the graphic cards revolution where each year you could have shiny new GFX and visuals, and that drove new games development (and funding). But indeed being contrived and self-referential didn't help.

Or maybe adventure games were always a niche genre for a niche of people, it just happened that the niche of computer/console players in the early days coincided more.

[spankibalt]

> Partially agree, but I also think that they were victims of the graphic cards revolution where each year you could have shiny new GFX and visuals, and that drove new games development (and funding).

True as well; the race towards photorealism and natural immersion (mostly first-person 3D across various genres) had an almost suffocative, and sometimes obliterative, quality.

[spankibalt]

> The famous post https://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html illustrates how the genre became too contrived and self-referential (even poking fun at those who blame “television-atrophied attention spans”).

That's a name I haven't heard in a long while. And the "Cat Stache Puzzle", once an infamous case-study of virtual insanity in game design, now nearly forgotten...

[retsibsi]

I reckon there's an important difference between a challenge being frustrating because it's hard, and a challenge being frustrating because there's no interesting way to approach it. Hard puzzles can be fun and satisfying to solve (albeit frustrating at some points along the way) when the process of solving them involves doing something clever or creative. But when the difficulty arises because the solution is basically arbitrary, and so I just have to do a brute force search, that's a tedious waste of time.

The boundaries can be blurry, and a puzzle can wrongly seem to fall into the tedious category because I'm missing something. But, in my opinion, classic adventure game puzzles too often really are arbitrary and boring.

[darkwater]

I agree but IMO it's better to have a puzzle that's frustrating because, like you say, there is no interesting way to approach it rather than just have easy puzzles.

[Teever]

Nah, the genre died because of the rise of 3D graphics and Microsoft’s push into the console market with Xbox and Halo.

The whole industry changed when the Xbox came to town. Microsoft really fostered that bro gamer culture to sell Xboxes to normies and fast paced violent games took over to the detriment of other genres and styles of play.

I’m really pleased to see a bit of a revival of adventure games because I think that the tablet form factor and UI is absolutely perfect for them.

I’m so happy to hear that there’s going to be a Thimbleweed Park 2.

[pezezin]

Graphical adventure games were already dead before the Xbox even arrived, and besides that the first Xbox was not that popular outside North America so it could not have affected other regions.

[anonreplier]

They may have been dead by the original xbox, but they definitely had a pulse at the time of the original ps1

[trollbridge]

Interestingly, with AI/LLMs now the large combinatorial state space problem could be somewhat fixed (alongside having much richer dialogue trees).

[cauch]

> (monkey wrench, anyone?)

Tell me about it. I played the French translated version, and the pun does not translate at all. "Monkey wrench" was translated as the french equivalent, "clé à molette", which does not reference monkeys at all. I remember being stuck for ages, and finally checking the solution online and concluding that the only way to find the solution is to systematically try all combinations as there is no way to apply logic. Only years later I realised that in english, "clé à molette" is "monkey wrench".

[b473a]

If you like the vibes but not the humor you might like The Dig. It's more serious, and has Orson Scott Card and Stephen Spielberg credited as writers. I last played as a kid it in the 90's, but still I have very vivid memories of it.

[arexxbifs]

It's not that I dislike the humor, I just don't think it's as hilarious as it's often made out to be. Insult sword fighting, for example, is at best a sensible chuckle and gets pretty long in the tooth after the first two attempts or so.

[chaostheory]

I like Maniac Mansion the best. The sequel wasn't bad either.

[account42]

It's an point and click adventure made by a renowned point and click designer for point and click adventure enthusiasts. Some moon logic is to be expected - I didn't find it to be particularly bad in this game. I think its OK to have games that are targeted at veterans of a certain genre.

The 4th wall breaking was lame though, especially the ending.

[esperent]

Moon logic - I've just got to the end and the solution to the very, very last puzzle to finish the game... is apparently to be found in the kickstarter video from more than fifteen years ago.

You're given a random balloon dog, there's no reason to be given it, there's no in game meaning behind it, and to finish the game you have to use it on a specific thing that you'd never think to try unless you were just trying random stuff.

That's not "moon logic". It's complete bs and a terrible puzzle to end the game on. When people talk about game developers disrespecting players, this is exactly the kind of thing they mean. Expecting the player to have watched their kickstarter video! Seriously...

[whywhywhywhy]

Looking back I do wonder if Monkey Island etc would appeal to me at all fresh, only one I think would still land is maybe Loom but I think the jokes in it would be the worst part.

These games definitely felt magical as a kid but I think the feeling of it being this whole rich interactive little world full of characters carried a lot of weak jokes and writing.

[wolvoleo]

MI1 was nice IMO. Not too hard, the insult game was innovative. It established a lot of characters. MI2 was way way too hard for me. And when I played it first on Amiga a lot of transitions took one minute to load from floppy which made it incredibly tedious. So I never finished that without a walkthrough.

[hnal943]

Man if your example of weak video game writing is Monkey Island I think you're going to be disappointed a lot.

[whywhywhywhy]

Was my favorite game for a long period as a kid and I loved it then, I'm saying if it looked at the same thing today without that nostalgia without what felt magic about it.

[hnal943]

I definitely agree that so much of the magic of gaming during that era was moving from the command prompt to seeing the computer explode with color and sound. That said, the thing my friends and I enjoyed the most about Monkey Island was reading the dialog out loud to each other, like a play. The dialog might be childish (we were children) but I think it was pretty funny.

[bsder]

I feel like people give Ron Gilbert way too much credit. His writing seems just mediocre at best. One big problem is that Ron Gilbert can't write an ending for crap. A meta-ending is interesting or surprising maybe once. After that, you're a hack writer.

And, honestly, I liked the art of the last Monkey Island. I thought the "ugly" art fit the pirate theme really well. The writing and puzzles--not so much.

My guess is that the stuff I like best about Maniac Mansion and Monkey Island is probably the result of Tim Schafer rather than Ron Gilbert.

I won't buy into another Ron Gilbert thing unless I've got people I trust raving about it first.

[NikolaNovak]

I gave up half way through. There was a lack of direction (for me) and too many permutations of clicks, characters, items and locations. The humour was ok, the story I was willing to give a chance. But I didn't want to resort to a walk through so I just kind of petered out.

[theandrewbailey]

> there's no logic to solving them so you'd have to resort to clicking everything and with 5 playable characters

Are multiple/simultaneous playable characters a common feature of adventure game design from LucasArts alum? I played Broken Age and thought the idea was novel, but recently played through Day of the Tentacle for the first time and thought the mechanic made things too complicated. So many people say that adventure games are nostalgic, but the ones I played growing up were Kings Quest 6 and Myst (games with only one playable character). These other multiple character adventure games are nowhere near enjoyable for me.

[egypturnash]

It's more Ron Gilbert's thing than anything else.

Manic Mansion, MM2, The Cave, Thimbleweed Park, and now TWP2: Gilbert's. Possibly also some of the many kid's games he did https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Gilbert#Games

Broken Age is the only one of the many, many games Tim Schaefer lead that does it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Schafer#Ludography

I have generally found it to be some tedious bullshit that stretches out the length of the game far, far too much, and I grew up playing a lot of these point and click adventures.

[ahefner]

Seems to be a tradition rooted in the original Maniac Mansion. In Thimbleweed Park the multiple characters became tedious due to having to walk multiple people all over and pass items between them, though I enjoyed being able to see the world through the different lenses of how Ray and Reyes vs. Ransome vs. Delores react to things.

Day of the Tentacle (which coincidentally I've replayed in the past week) executed the multiple characters mechanic the best I've seen, since each character was confined to their own area (past/present/future) and you could instantly pass items between them.

[raverbashing]

And honestly the Lucas Arts puzzles were serviceable (their philosophy was always "you can't go wrong" (with very obvious but little exceptions), the Sierra "logic" of fucking you silently in the middle of the game was just tiring. Nobody got time for that

[dspillett]

> Day of the Tentacle for the first time and thought the mechanic made things too complicated.

I've not played that in decades, but I remember liking the mechanic. For the most part it wasn't much different from one character with more freedom to move between areas (timezones in that case), but the need to pass objects through time added some variety and humour (send hamster via freezer, but then how do you warm it up again?).

[unixhero]

Yes it is a thing. Maniac Mansion, Day Of The Tentacle, Zak McKraken and The Alien Mindbenders, The Dig

[hibikir]

A strange take, as the Lucasarts multi-character games, like Dott and Maniac Mansion at least try to push you forward and have reasonable hints. KQ6 has fewer nonsensical dead-man-walking situations (you should see how much worse earlier installments were), but it still has them. Oops, the game is unfinishable now, because of an item you don't have, and it's not even hinted that you need, or you could have obtained earlier!

Thimbleweed park is, if anything, on the easy side of the genre. Not quite as easy as Loom, but it's still on the easy side, and with a built in hint system. Day of the Tentacle's main problem is dependence of US culture. Just like the old "monkey wrench" thing in Monkey Island 2, using an actual monkey as a wrench. Still, in DoTT, you get in-game dialogue that will basically teach you some of it, although it doesn't work quite as well.

The complaint would make more sense if it was limited to Zak McCraken, as that one really s quite tough and random.

[amon_spek]

I heard Charles Cecil make the same comment about "monkey wrench" in a recent podcast interview, and I must say it was not my experience at all. In my world (45+ years in Western Europe), monkey wrench and pipe wrench have always been synonymous. An adjustable spanner is another tool entirely.

[vunderba]

Agreed. I don’t mind having to use a hint book or look things up on GameFAQs, but if, even after that, the solution to a puzzle still makes me go, “How the hell would I ever have figured that out?”, then that’s profoundly unsatisfying for me.

This is my biggest problem with adventure games in general, and I'm a huge King's Quest fan, but sometimes the number of cryptic "What you didn't realize you needed to kneel in front of a cliff with a red crystal to summon the tornado Uber? so obvious" stuff definitely can put off newcomers from the genre.

[jstummbillig]

> Only about 20% of the jokes land for me

I found the game so intensely unfunny (and there are few things I am selfishly rooting more for in life than another great point and click adventure)

[stavros]

You should try Drifter, it's much more serious but I enjoyed it greatly.

[alberto-m]

I found the puzzles fair enough, but my impressions about writing and characters match yours.

[pteraspidomorph]

I suspect that while Ron Gilbert is great at what he does, Tim Schafer was always the funnier writer of the Monkey Island trio...

[lkramer]

I agree Thimbleweed Park was a little rough, a bit like Maniac Mansion if you like. What gives me hope is that Monkey Island 5 was really really good, so I feel he's back in his grove.

[andai]

Did you like the King's Quest games?

[vanderZwan]

> The constant 4th wall breaking is just bad

IMO Ron Gilbert's biggest weakness as a writer is mainly that he has a tendency to use fourth wall breaking for everything, including the final plot twist in most of his games. It was there in his originally planned ending for The Secret of Monkey Island. That ending sort of came back as the actual ending of Monkey Island 2. Then Monkey Island 3, which didn't involve Gilbert, soft-retconned the previous game's ending, then three games later Ron Gilbert came back for Return to Monkey Island and basically retconned everything to use the original ending he planned for the first game!

And I think the main problem with it is that it tends to make the writing feel like the author doesn't dare to admit that they love the world that they created. It's kind of like how some teenagers discover sarcasm and use it everywhere because it makes them feel more "mature" than younger kids who don't understand it yet, without realizing it actually makes it very obvious to everyone else that they are masking their insecurities by acting "edgy".

To me, Gilbert's tendency for 4th wall breaking often ends up feeling similar, like the story is trying to be self-deprecating to mask insecurities about its own writing (and also, it just feels like a total cop-out to avoid writing a ending that ties all the absurd plot threads together into a satisfying pay-off).

Thimbleweed Park had that problem for me, and it kind of soured me on the ending.

Now, I don't want to suggest that the meta stuff is inherently bad. In fact, the ending of Return to Monkey Island actually was pretty satisfying to me. Mainly because of Elaine. At some point there is a very blatantly fourth-wall breaking dialogue you have with her, but unlike other times it feels more like an honest reflection on nostalgia for old adventure series, its stale tropes, how that represents growing older and having to accept that things change or be stunted forever. And it comes back at the ending in a way that makes it very clear that the implied message is "yeah it's all make-belief nonsense, it has flaws, and it's also fine to admit that you love it anyway". You're Guybrush Threepwood with a loving wife who keeps you grounded despite yourself, and the fourth wall breaking doesn't take that away. It's meta but it's sincere meta.

So I guess Gilbert's a fine writer as long as he manages to keep the fourth wall breaking grounded in sincerity. Return to Monkey Island came out five years after Thimbleweed Park, so maybe Thimbleweed Park 2 will have a similar nuance to it. I hope it does.

[agos]

thanks for putting this in words much better than I could. I truly appreciated the bittersweet finale of RMI which told us all "hey you've grown up you have a family now, we all know this is fake, but you still love it and it's endearing that you care about this, even knowing if there's no big payoff or grand reveal of the secret"

[BeetleB]

Difficulty is on par with 90's adventure games (and actually easier than Sierra games).

Story: Without any spoilers, I'll just say the ending isn't satisfying in the least. He does the equivalent of "I woke up and it was all a dream."

[hnal943]

Of course so does Twin Peaks, and there's clearly a Twin Peaks/X Files vibe to this game.

[wolvoleo]

One recent game I really liked was VirtuaVerse. Not incredibly hard, really good music and art design. It really felt like it took the lucasarts game style into the next century.

[hnal943]

Broken sword is definitely a different style of game. I stopped playing broken sword when I had to solve a 15 puzzle to enter a sewer.

[tarkin2]

I wonder did you enjoy the Monkey Island games. I really loved Delores and Ransome particularly in TWP.

[wbl]

Worse than the Babel fish dispenser?

[simpetre]

Meh to each their own - I haven't played it for a while but I quite like TP's style/music/atmosphere, and the surrealness/metaness was a feature not a bug for me. I played SoMI2 with my friends telling me that the ending was super weird, so I didn't feel completely cheated when I got to that one and I think TP's ending is very Ron Gilbert.

Agree that some moon logic is present/inevitable but I think the Gilbert games are friendlier than most in this respect.

[wccrawford]

I didn't play on hard, but that wasn't my experience with the puzzles. I thought they were all pretty good. I didn't use a guide at all.

It's been a while, but I think I pretty much agree about the writing and story. I pretty much don't even remember it.