This is one of those games that has spent years waiting for it's day in the sun. In fact, it was one of the first games I got when Epic Games started giving away free games every week. But was it worth the wait? Well, I can't say it really was, unfortunately.
Story: A murder has been committed in the rundown town of Thimbleweed Park, and the crime must be solved so the murderer can be brought to justice before they kill again. To this end, FBI agents Reyes and Ray have arrived. But there are many secrets in the once bustling town, and not everyone is ok with agents from the US government snooping around... and even the agents themselves have their own reasons to have taken up this case.
With all these secrets flying around, it shouldn't take long to realize the murder case is only act 1 of a much bigger story/conspiracy which will lead our cast by the nose as you solve their individual problems... even if the connections range anywhere from central to the real story to they just happen to brush against the main conspiracy by circumstance. And this goes beyond these two agents, as three more characters will join your playable cast well before you even reach the half-way point of this game: a washed up clown, a game designer who came home due to her uncle's death, and the ghost of her father murdered long ago. Looking back after finishing you can see the links each character has, but as I said, some's stories are deeply entwined, while others are literally walking filler, which is a shame because the one who will entertain you the most is one of these filler characters: Ransome the clown.
Ransome is basically this game's version of Triumph the Insult Dog: His rather successful act was to walk into an adoring audience and just rip into them mercilessly while the audience laughed along, convinced they were laughing with him. He really let them have it night after night until his world collapsed, leaving him to live alone in the now ruined circus he once called his stage. This may sound sad, but this guy is just rude enough to be funny constantly and the game's need to bleep out at least one word out of every three sentences he utters matched with the raspy almost Krusty the Clown type voice just hits together brilliantly to make him a crowd favorite (you can see why the audience loved him). He even somehow comes off as sympathetic at times, and always the single most brutally honest member of the gaming cast. (For example he's one of the only characters in town who will admit one of the dead men in this story wasn't a hero for anything, but just a jackass who bullied his way through things.) But at the same time, his story has the absolute least impact in the entire game, making him sadly inconsequential.
And this problem just fills the writing of this game, as almost nothing that happens in the first 2/3rds of the adventure really have any connection to the big reveal at the very end. Literally, nothing. The quirky characters like the sheriff and the coroner who you never see in the same place at the same time, but somehow look and talk exactly alike? Or the plumbers who insist on dressing like pigeons? Nothing comes of any of it. In fact only the uncle's story seems to matter at all, but to explain that I need to literally spoil the end of the entire game. So if you don't want to read it, please skip past the indented and italics part below:
By the end of the game, all the characters will be focused on the abandoned pillow factory where the uncle of the game programmer Delores had been doing secret projects until his death. Entering will find him having not so much died as downloaded himself into the computers from which he plans to take over the world... or so it would seem. When he comes to his senses, he explains to his actions... by telling her that this whole thing is a video game and it's up to her to end the cycle starting, playing, finishing, and then resetting the game. It's up to her to delete the very game you are playing.... literally taking away the meaning of basically anything done through the entire game and making that deletion the ONLY thing that matters.
UNFORTUNATELY the stinger at the end of the credits even denies that point as the credits end to show the screen of Commadore 64 the "user" runs a recovering program to restore that deleted game and restart it, destroying even that 4th wall ending.
In short, the only story that really matters here is Delores the programmer since she discovers what happened to her uncle and why, but it's all for nothing without a point. Frankly it's just a bad ending that feels stapled on the end and was frankly done better in 1990s movies.
3/10
Graphics: If you play classic point and click games from the days of MS-DOS, you already have a good idea of just what this game looks like. The game's designed to imitate this, specifically the look of old LucasArts point and click titles that used the old SCUMM engine, which makes sense considering two of the main minds behind it are Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick of Monkey Island fame. They were looking to capture the old magic of the old days, and at least visually, they did damn near perfectly.
For those of you new to these games, expect a retro-looking game where you will move characters around a hand painted world, limited to the 256 color barrier and "generally" the resolutions of 90s PC video games. Characters all look good enough as cartoon caricatures who remain expressive as hell, if not even remotely aiming for realism in their looks, surrounded by hand drawn sprites of objects in a world rendered with the care of the day. Over the bottom quarter of this screen you will have your commands and inventory, each taking roughly half that reserved space and making what they do fairly obvious.
And the total package doesn't look half bad. If you played games like this before, it's a trip down memory lane, and if not, it's a retro flair that honestly is very pleasing to the eye.
8/10
Sound: Much like the graphics, the soundscape in this game is also going to be a treat, though less for nostalgia this time around. The game is emulating a day when you would have two versions of these kind of games: a voiceless version sold on 3.5 inch disks and a "talkie" version on CD-ROM, but the limits of the tech of the time offered much less quality then you will hear in those voices. Everyone here is crystal clear and frankly played pretty damn well. Your agents play the perfect good-cop/bad-cop the entire time, making them entertaining enough, but then you get to the rest of the cast, and, well you will likely have a favorite or two (as well as one or two you find annoying, if in a way that makes you want to figure out just what their deal it). It really is amazing.
Sounds also work pretty well here too, if in a much more limited scope. You will get all the proper sounds for anything animated on screen, but its often things like an object being swiped, a fist flying, or the squeak of Ransome's clown shoes (seriously no one else makes noise while walking). It sounds good, but little stands out in any real significant way.
Music is also like the sound here. It works but is often just background that will not matter to you beyond to add a tone to the scene you are in (be it tension or urgency).
7/10
Gameplay: Once again, if you played these games in their hayday, you know exactly what you are getting into. For those new to the gametype, you will basically control your cast completely with the mouse as they wander Thumbleweed Park, clicking to make your current character choice go and items of interest getting a highlighted name if you happen to mouse over them, and it's a good thing too as this game also has all the weaknesses point and click titles were known for. You can also always select an item in your inventory to look it over at any time as well.
If you want to do an action to something either in the scene or that inventory, you can do so by first selecting one of the 9 actions on the bottom left side of the screen before selecting what you want to do the action with, but most such objects will also have a shortcut for most common actions: highlighting it will cause one of the actions to highlight, and this will be the one automatically chosen if you right click on the whatever you are looking to click. It isn't a lot, but it can speed along more mundane actions by cutting down on clicks.
You will use this rather easy to understand interface to help each of your five characters reach their individual goals as you try to solve the situational puzzles that make up the body of the game. These can be very obtuse depending on the difficulty you choose when you start the game. And by obtuse, I mean "why the hell would you think to pixel hunt those two pixels over there?" obtuse. Fortunately the game does offer hints are you a hand if you need it, so the developers understood what they were doing.
But really this feels like one of those retro-games, so if you miss them, this is definitely something to play.
7/10
Bugs: Once again, we have another game that ran pretty much flawlessly from start to finish. No complaints on this front.
Digital Rights Management: The DRM picture for this game is a bit more mixed then one would like. Obviously if you bought it on GOG, there is nothing here to get in the way of your game, and surprisingly the same is true for the Epic store. You may need to go run the exe directly rather then the shortcut it installs, but the game does not need Epic to run! Unfortunately if you got the game anywhere else this is not the case, as it either is the Steam copy which needs Steam or to support it. The odd exception with a trade-off in your favor is the Windows store where the DRM is used to support Xbox Play Anywhere and giving you access to play on both your PC and Xbox console if you have one.
Source: PC Gaming Wiki
Score: It's a shame I have to come down as hard on this game as I do. Mechanically, visually, and audibly, this game is absolutely brilliant in just how much it plays both the nostalgia it offers and the feeling when you figure out its puzzles. But this kind of gameplay is EXACTLY what you get with those older games, and frankly I think a lot of them tell a better story a ton better then this one ever could. Since these kind of games can live and die on that, I just can't call it as great a game as I want to for these elements, as that glue to hold it together just doesn't work. In fact the ending tears it apart. If you REALLY need a classic style point and click, it's worth a shot, but not much else. There really are better choices provided you haven't played them yet.
5/10
System Requirements:
- Any CPU running at 2 Ghz or higher
- 4 GB RAM
- Intel HD 3000
- Windows 7
- 1 GB Hard Drive space
System Specs:
- Ryzen 7 (5700X) 3.4 Ghz
- 32 GB RAM
- AMD Radeon RX 6650 XT (8 GB VRAM)
- Windows 11 (64 Bit)
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