(Not) a Thimbleweed Park review
Retronator Games Watchlist
10/10, go buy it.
OK, now that the review part is out of the way, let’s talk about Thimbleweed Park.
If you’re new to Retronator Magazine, let me warn you that this is not an article format you’re used to from either Medium or 80s computer magazines for that matter. It’s a highly advanced illustrated text reading adventure. OK, it’s just an article with a million pictures in between. But it even comes with music. Here, put this on:
What you should know is that everything I talk about gets echoed with screenshots from the game. If you want absolutely no spoilers in form of game dialog, you should stop now. Go away. ESC!!!
The article text itself holds no spoilers whatsoever and even the images I wouldn’t consider as such personally, but you be your own judge. They’re not giving any puzzle solutions away, just juicy dialog lines.
Ready to click that New Game?
Actually, before I forget, since this is not 2005 anymore (when I used to review games for money), I have a couple of important disclaimers.
I am a big fan of Thimbleweed Park and have invested money into its development, multiple times. Exhibit A:
Next, I had in-person verbal contact with David Fox, Thimbleweed Park’s gameplay programmer and LucasArts employee #3. I like his mustache. I follow him on Twitter and he follows me back. David helped iron out some of LucasArts history facts in this article. Thank you, good sir!
Ron Gilbert, the game’s writer and engine programer and the guy who defined point-and-click adventures and cutscenes all in one game (Maniac Mansion), also follows me on Twitter. I never talked to him in person though.
Ron might also be supporting my game Pixel Art Academy, but it could also be some random Ron Gilbert guy, I will never know.
My unprofessional involvement doesn’t stop there. I monthly send money to one of Thimbleweed’s artists, Octavi Navaro a.k.a. Pixels Huh on Patreon. You should too. You can get fancy exclusive artworks from him.
I wish I could also send money to Thimbleweed Park’s lead background artist Mark Ferrari, but he’s not on Patreon. Instead, I take any chance I get to post his color cycling artworks from the 90s.
I think you can understand why I get excited when artists like Mark and Octavi work on a videogame.
Final disclaimer: I was playing a press copy of the game. I’ll receive my own late-backers copy, but by accepting their generous gift I could finish and review the game prior to release. My first early press copy, holy shit!
Terrible Toybox (the developers) and their PR representative have not asked me to say nice things about them in return. They are very professional like that. What they did though is plead to not use old artwork from the Kickstarter campaign in press coverage. Their appeal fell on deaf ears, since I love showing the evolution of games’ art over time.
Just look at this ugly duckling:
The image is from November 2014 when Ron Gilbert, together with Gary Winnick—the other author of Maniac Mansion and Thimbleweed Park’s lead artist—launched a Kickstarter campaign for their new adventure.
Fast forward to 2017 to how the same scene looks in the final game:
Yes, I can see why they’d cringe with embarrassment in comparison. It’s quite a change, and we’ll get to the story behind it in a bit.
Thimbleweed Park started as a spiritual successor to Maniac Mansion and Monkey Island. “It’s like opening a dusty old desk drawer and finding an undiscovered LucasArts adventure game you’ve never played before.”
Let’s look at the Kickstarter mockup again:
Yes, it doesn’t get much more Maniac Mansion than that.
Oh hey, and guess who the gameplay programer was, besides Ron …
Yes, David ‘I like his mustache’ Fox. It was pretty much the three of them working on Maniac Mansion, back in 1987 at George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch.
Five years earlier, George Lucas (of Star Wars fame) expanded the Computer Division of Lucasfilm with a game development group, aptly named Lucasfilm Games.
Side note: Don’t feel confused if you thought LucasArts made your favorite adventure games from your childhood. Your memory is doing fine, grandpa. Lucasfilm Games soon became its own division within Lucasfilm and in 1990 morphed into LucasArts Entertainment Company. (Side note side note: The graphics group of the Computer Division met a different fate when it was sold in 1986 to Steve Jobs and became known as Pixar (yay!). In a somewhat ironic string of events, Disney bought Pixar in 2006 and in 2012 Lucasfilm as well. Everyone wears Mickey ears now. LucasArts was disbanded (boo!) with only a skeleton staff left to license its franchises to other developers.)
Anyway, back in 1982 David Fox became the third employee at Lucasfilm Games. Gary Winnick joined in 1984 as the first artist/animator on the team. Ron Gilbert was hired a year later based on his prowess of Commodore 64, for which he wrote Graphics BASIC.
For a couple of years, the trio worked on obscure titles only the wisests remember (Rescue on Fractalus!, Koronis Rift, The Eidolon, and Labyrinth, anyone?). After they proved themselves, Ron and Gary received the keys to the mansion (sort of speaking) to come up with their own game.
Maniac Mansion was a marvel of engineering, especially when you think about it running in 64 kilobytes of memory on a Commodore. The engine had multitasking so gameplay scripts could run in parallel. Instead of typing (and guessing) commands, you clicked on verbs and items on the screen (point-and-click). You didn’t move the teenagers directly, you clicked on the destination and they figured their way there (pathfinding). The game had sidescrolling and the camera even “cut” to other parts of the house where an animated scene would progress the story (cut scenes!). All in 64-fucking-k!!!
Maniac Mansion wasn’t the first adventure to have a point-and-click interface, it wasn’t the first to use verbs instead of typing, and it wasn’t the first to have characters running around a scene.
Maniac Mansion was the first to combine it all and it did it at such a high level that it defined the genre for a whole decade to come.
With point-and-click adventures firmly on the map, Lucasfilm Games entered a golden era. David Fox took design lead with Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders, and joined forces with Ron Gilbert and Noah Falstein for Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure (not to be confused with the not-so-memorable Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Action Game released the same year).
Now, if you look closely at Zak McKracken art, you should recognize a couple of things:
Those characters, definitely Gary Winnick.
How about backgrounds?
I’ll let you wonder that for a paragraph.
As the first artist on the team, Gary Winick soon became the art director and was in charge of hiring new talent. At a sci-fi/fantasy convention he attended, everyone was raging about an artist that drew incredible pieces in prismacolor pencils.
Yes, Mark Ferrari. Gary invited Mark to Skywalker Ranch and as soon as he showed him the ropes of digital painting (on an IBM PC in Deluxe Paint), Mark quickly became a major influencer of the art style and techniques used at Lucasfilm Games.
If we look at Zak McKracken again …
… even with the crudeness of the EGA palette, you can sense those color cycling pieces written in Mark’s future.
The road to greatness would take some time. When David and Ron moved to work on Indy, Mark collaborated with Gary on another classic, Loom.
Mark’s traditional art prowess got unleashed as he started using dither (putting two colors into a grid pattern) to create all new sorts of colors.
Some people even mistakenly thought this was VGA since they’ve never seen anything like it before.
When The Last Crusade and Loom came to a close, the stage was set for the second spiritual predecessor of Thimbleweed Park. As we all know, Ron Gilbert went on to design a game inspired by the Disneyland ride Pirates of the Caribbean and the book On Stranger Tides. It was time for The Secret of Monkey Island.
Or as you might remember it in VGA:
Mark again worked on the backgrounds, really bringing the glory of EGA sunsets to the max!
Can you see the connection?
In fact, the VGA version of the same Monkey Island scene hits even closer to home. Alas, sans sunset.
With the jump to the 9-verb structure, that’s pretty much how Thimbleweed Park looks today.
So why did the Kickstarter graphics look that much different from the finished game?
Just like when Gary and Ron worked on Maniac Mansion, at the time of the Kickstarter, Mark Ferrari wasn’t on the team yet.
The campaign asked for $375,000 and if they got that and not a dollar more, they would have just enough money for Gary to work on the art alone. The idea that you’d find a forgotten 1980s LucasArts adventure worked hand in hand with the fact that on that budget, the graphics couldn’t be much better than at the end of the eighties either.
So for the first five months of development in 2015, that’s how things looked like.
It wasn’t a problem though. Gary was mainly in design phase, using his comic books experience to draw concept art for all the locations.
These would be transformed into wireframes, very crude drawings which have all the necessary items in place so they can be wired with gameplay to create a playable prototype.
They didn’t look pretty, they just needed to be functional. Any of these might be changed or cut at any point so losing time with details or lighting would be a waste of time.
The designs that worked though, ended up in the released game.
As you can see, you’re looking at Gary’s design, even when it’s rendered by Mark Ferrari.
Side note:
Who put the toilet paper like that?!?
Ahhhh!
End side note.
OK, back to Mark Ferrari. The Kickstarter campaign didn’t just earn those $375k they asked for, it went two thirds overboard. This meant that in February 2015 David Fox could join to reunite the Maniac Mansion trio. Three months later Mark also became available for full-time work and with the extra funds in the bank Gary got his #1 player pick to work on the game’s backgrounds.
Mark pitched a new art direction, much along the lines of the VGA version of Monkey Island. Thimbleweed Park was no longer a game that was actually forgotten in a drawer in 1987, it became a game you think you remember from 1987. I know my imagination back then inserted a lot of details that never existed in the games, simply from looking at game covers (and sometimes Amiga screenshots, which blew my ZX Spectrum mind).
The art upgrade was approved and Mark started turning this:
into this:
Gary, not having to worry about backgrounds, continued to focus on character design.
Like everything, these too required exploration and iteration, first on paper, then in pixels.
To handle the increased workload on both animation and backgrounds side, Octavi Navarro completed the art team when the game entered production in August 2015. Seven months of designing, setting direction, building the game engine, and prototyping were over.
Four more people joined the team for production. Lauren Davidson helped Ron write dialogs, with Jenn Sandercock scripting a couple of locations alongside David. Robert Megone became the lead tester, and Malcolm Stead from Ron’s Deathspank days came on board for the Xbox port.
But don’t be fooled. It’s profoundly inspiring to me that Ron, Gary and David churn out most of the code and pixels. It blew my mind.
The way my career as a programmer was explained to me is that you’re a code monkey in your twenties, sipping Red Bulls, pulling all-nighters, slaving at meaningless UI code. By your thirties you’re supposed to have built your position to something like a Lead Architect, who designs how systems fit together and lays down the most important code. But nobody programs in their forties, god forbid! You’re better a producer by then, ordering around an army of replacable 20 year-olds to do your bidding. Or if your games did well, use the money to become a publisher, stealing profits from new kids on the block. Finally in your sixties you retire, smooth sailing towards death and all.
Not with these three.
Ron turned 51 right after the campaign and all he could think of was finding the next scripting language (he settled on Squirrel) and putting it into a shiny new adventure engine he started writing from scratch, as if his legacy of creating SCUMM (Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion, which also powered all LucasArts adventures before Grim Fandango) was not enough.
Here, I’ll let Ron explain walk boxes to you.
David Fox, god bless his mustache, is 66 now. For the past two years, he rolled up his sleeves again and got his hands dirty as a gameplay coder, meticulously writing almost all the scripts that make the characters and items do what they need to be doing in the game. His career regressed back to 1987 and he couldn’t be happier for it.
The three brainstorm the puzzles, geek over dependency charts, hang out in development blog comments, answer a shitton of fan questions in their podcast … THEY are doing the grunt work, making their videogame and reliving the best time of their lives!
You can tell I get really excited when I find role models that show me that I’ll be able to code and draw and design videogames when I’m 60.
Let’s not forget that Ron Gilbert is also one of the most brilliant game designers out there. Maniac Mansion featured 7 playable characters, 2 of which you chose to tag along the protagonist Dave. This led to numerous combinations of how to get through the game, often overwhelmingly more than the wet-behind-the-ears team could handle.
Nobody comes close to something as ambitious today, except for Ron Gilbert in 2013, when he released The Cave over at Tim Schafer’s Double Fine Productions.
The Cave also featured 7 playable characters who worked in teams of 3, with different skills for each character. Ron has a thing for complicating his life it seems. Thimbleweed Park continues this tradition.
Side note: if you paid close attention to the Monkey Island title sequence (or if you simply know your adventure history well), you’ve seen Tim Schafer as one of the coders on Monkey Island. David Fox hired him as a gameplay scripter at the time and the rest is history (a history that involves creating Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle, Grim Fandango and Broken Age at that).
Oh yeah, if you didn’t know, Day of the Tentacle was in fact Maniac Mansion II: Day of the Tentacle, featuring good ‘ol Bernard as one of the the three characters. And you guessed it—you could switch between the mighty trio at any time.
End side note. It was the final one, I promise.
We’re now ready to look at Thimbleweed Park, the game we’re all here for (well, those of you who made it this far in my illustrated children’s Medium article).
Before we start, a note on the screenshots (it’s not a side note, I swear!). Thimbleweed Park threads softly on the grounds of nostalgia. To not induce the curse of enraged fans for evolving the user interface, controls were added to opt out of the changes.
Here’s the default user experience, fresh out of the box:
The sentence line (“Walk to corpse”) is not docked to the bottom like in previous adventures. The text floats above the cursor, so you don’t have to jump with your eyes from the pointer to the bottom of the screen all the time. I personally adopted this with great pleasure.
You can put the sentence line back in place though.
And if you’re crying over the old-school Commodore 64 typography, you can turn that back on as well.
I personally like the default font on the verbs, but prefer the old one for the dialogs, a combination which is also available to my demanding, overprivileged ass.
You’ll be seeing this style in all my screenshots, so just for one last time, here’s also the new font on the dialogs (dialog text is otherwise off by default).
Final spoiler warning for screenshots: if you’d rather not see any of the locations that weren’t shown in press coverage so far, you might want to head to the development blog, buy the thing, and make up your own damn mind about the game.
If you want to hear my thoughts and see a cool location or two that was never shown before, carry on.
Alright! Are you ready? The review!
Thimbleweed Park delivers on the promise of being a true old-school point-and-click adventure. It’s as if Maniac Mansion 2 wasn’t developed by Tim Schafer, Dave Grossman and others, but stayed in the hands of Ron, Gary, David and Mark. Lucky for us, since both games fucking rule, I’m glad the two alternative histories both live in our lifetimes.
This comparison hits closer to home than expected. Just like in Day of the Tentacle, in Thimbleweed Park you don’t choose which characters will be part of the story — they all slowly unlock as the plot develops. Except instead of three, we get 5 of them.
You start with the two federal agents you’ve already seen plastered over all the images so far: experienced (and bitter) Ray and younger (and eager) Reyes.
They are mostly interchangeable and give a nice choice of a cynical or cheerful commentary of the game’s world. Even though their lines are the same for the most part, the voice actors did a great job at breathing different life into each character.
You soon meet the supporting cast, which is an unexpectedly pleasant mix of bizarre, weird and humorous-a-reno.
As you investigate the murder, you cross paths with the other three playable characters and soon take control of their fate. Whereas the agents can both do the same things (with rare puzzles that involve both of them), the others are more specific as their backgrounds tie deeply into the history of Thimbleweed Park (the name of the degenerating town where the game takes place).
First we have Delores, a lovable game developer who’s in town for the will reading of her late uncle.
Franklin is Delores’ dad. Like the uncle, he is also dead. But still plenty kicking, even though he lacks a bit in the self-confidence department.
Finally, we have Ransome the Fucking Insult Clown. Ah, Ransome.
I need to give a special shout out to Ian Corlett who voiced the offensive clown. The hilarious writing together with his delivery make Ransome one of the best characters in the game — and I hate clowns, so this means a lot.
In the game, all Ransome’s lines are beeped out, but Ian actually went all-out swearing in the recording sessions, so there’s a chance we’ll get an uncensored version at some point. I’d replay the game for that.
The five character arcs develop in parallel, but are mostly independent. Time-travel interactions in Day of the Tentacle were much more involved in that regard.
Each of the five characters is equipped with a list of goals that progress their story further. Some goals are shared (especially between the agents), and you’ll occasionally have to hand over an item from a character to another to help them out.
Thimbleweed Park is very clear like that—you always know what you’re trying to do. In 1989, Ron wrote an article titled Why Adventure Games Suck where he laid out rules of thumb he used while designing Monkey Island. Thanks to his rules, Monkey Island did away with stuff like dead ends, dying and arbitrary puzzles.
If Thimbleweed Park follows Maniac Mansion in its setting, the puzzle design clearly follows the later predecessor. While Monkey Island still had a sour monkey wrench in there or two, Thimbleweed Park perfects Ron’s philosophy.
I don’t remember when I last finished an adventure game without looking at a walkthrough at least once. Maybe even never. I finished Thimbleweed Park without any help though.
That is not to say the game is easy. I was playing on fucking Hard mode, alright?
It’s true that I was forced to not look at walkthroughs, since there weren’t any by the time I finished it (what with the game not being released and all). I was handed a real simulation of the eighties. Back then, if you got stuck in a game, you wrote a letter to your favorite magazine, they would print the letter in the readers section and if you were lucky, another reader who solved the puzzle would respond in the next month’s issue. It was kind of like having Internet with the latency of two months. Not something you can use when you have two weeks to write a review.
The press was given a walkthrough a few days before the release though (when I’ve already licked all my fingers), so be suspicious of cheating bastards at other journalistic establishments.
But my success did not come (just) because I was forced to think with my own head (as you know, once you look up a single walkthrough clue, it’s an instant drug addiction and every time you get stuck, you go for the easy way out). No, puzzles in Thimbleweed Park simply make sense.
When I say puzzles, don’t forget that this is an old-school adventure game. Gameplay is a never-ending (well, after-15-hours ending) sequence of well-designed hurdles the game throws at you, mainly the townsfolk refusing to do what you want, or missing an item to do it. Coming up with solutions is most alike riddles: you have a setup with a bunch of clues, and when you figure the item or action that fits the problem, you feel really clever.
The puzzles feed into each other, as expressed with Ron’s trademark puzzle dependency charts.
Thanks to a very informative development blog the authors maintained, you can see how gameplay looks from a structural standpoint.
Are you ready? (You are not ready.)
You always have a few open problems at hand, but it’s never so overwhelming that you’d have to resort to old-school frustrations such as trying to combine every possible item in your inventory. That will get you nowhere since there are no arbitrary solutions.
When I depleted my ideas on all loose ends, I simply turned off the game for the day and next time, with a fresh motivation to retrace my steps, the solution would always show up in a clue I missed. I can’t stress how much pride you get from being able to solve everything on your own.
Without getting into spoiler territory, I’ll say that the game’s ending holds up to that 10/10 rating as well. It’s not exactly the love/hate plot twist of Monkey Island 2, but close enough and it left me completely satisfied. Catharsis was strong.
It’s hard not to have a warm fuzzy feeling thinking about the game. I fell in love with the weird-a-reno town, and as funky as it is, I was always delighted to return.
I don’t think I need to praise the art and voice actors any more, but the music also contributes majorly to the Twin Peaks vibe the authors set to recreate. It’s a perfect match.
The tongue-in-cheek humor had me chuckling all throughout. It’s full of what we in the education space call multiple planes of engagement. Newcomers to adventuring will simply enjoy the puzzles and exploring, but there’s also another plane (get it?) of self-referencing writing that will reward the more demanding veterans of the genre.
Thanks to Kickstarter backers who were crowdsourced (=exploited as unpaid labor) to write in-game books and record answering machine messages, there’s even a ZX Spectrum mentioned in the game!
History, gameplay, art, audio, writing … 10/10.
If you disagree, I hope I was clear at the beginning how unprofessionally subjective I am when it comes to this game, so beep off.
But if you’re a fan of Maniac Mansion and Zak McKracken, I will leave you with this last screenshot that should tell you everything you need to know about the game.
Wow. Wow, wow, wow. The first Retronator Magazine game review is over. Holy shit. Fuck. As always, thanks for reading, thanks for caring about pixel art, thanks for going along with my experiment of visual storytelling (and swearing). I hope the infinite dance of text and images hit your heart in a soft spot and you learned something new today. I hope you go play the game. Here are some useful links. My words are one thing, but playing it is why you got here in the first place.
If you want to be cool, tweet at Ron and David (@grumpygamer and @DavidBFox) with a secret message “I came here from Retronator Magazine” and they will follow you back. Actually they won’t, I made this up. But David might answer your questions about Lucasfilm Games. Watch this amazing talk by him. Buy fine leather jackets. Be cool.
Now go. Go have fun-a-reno.
—Retro
