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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
After how he basically gave the middle finger to fans waiting 100 years for the "real" ending to Monkey Island 2, my reaction is
meh -_-
Though Thimbleweed Park 1 was awesome in every way
I wish/hope someone else would take up the mantle of continuing the -spirit- of Monkey Island and make a new franchise with a similar rename: call it Ape Archipelago or something :)
I would have preferred the same team working on a new IP. Thimbleweed Park 1 has possibly the worst ending of a game, ever. Just an endless series of being told that I am a big dummy for having suspended my disbelief. I see no way of believably returning to that world without the retcon of a lifetime.
If you feel like trying a hail Mary to perhaps improve the ending I have two theories that I couldn't muster enough strength to check. Also, spoilers from here on.
First, there's a fridge that you can't open close to the ending of the game and that I understand as containing the body of the ghost character. I imagine there must be a way to open it, if only to give him closure.
Second, and related: given that the ending shows you a Basic prompt I imagine there has to be a way to use it for something other than restarting the game. I believe there was (for instance) a part of the game about getting a videotape but, once you had the right equipment, was no longer available to get. Perhaps those parts of the game can be unlocked if you know how to use the console to set the proper variables.
I've long hoped that we've all been getting the bad ending while there's a second one hidden somewhere (which has been hinted at [1]), but since I was fairly down after the ending I got I couldn't muster the energy to replay it all again.
> Thimbleweed Park 1 has possibly the worst ending of a game, ever.
I see that someone hasn't played the latest Monkey Island.
Great news! Thimbleweed Park is a lovely game. I played it with my children and manage to recreate the atmosphere of those evenings in 1990, spent in front of a Commodore Amiga 500 running Zak McKraken and Maniac Mansion.
Hmm I don't remember completing the first and other than finding the phone amusing I don't remember much else about it. Will await reviews once done but if anyone hasn't played The drifter yet that is worth checking out
The Drifter is a great example of a slightly more modernized take on the classic adventure genre. Had a slow start and some grating voice acting, but gosh it ended up being a great experience.
The final scene of TP1; the one where they show the rising sun over a hill, that felt so at home for me. It was the only reason I played the game, to see that scene. Something about the colors reminded me of my childhood.
Of course I could just see it on youtube or a screenshot but I wanted it to feel natural, I wanted the story and characters to take me to that hill scene. That’s all I cared about.
As someone who didn’t play many of the point and click adventures growing up, thimbleweed park was a lot of fun. I also like the genre more than visual novels. I kind of felt like the dialogue was supposed to be cheesy so I just rolled with it. Were some of the things a little frustrating? Yea, but I think there is a lot of life left in this genre and I’m sure Ron will make some improvements. I can’t wait to play the next one.
Not enmeshed in game development and have only done it very lightly: what takes a game like this 1.5 - 2 years to finish?
Like at a minimum, it's art, sound, graphics, and programming. If they are re-using assets, that's one of them ~done. So what's taking them 2 years?
My background is in SaaS type stuff and if I went to who hired me and said it would take 2 years to build out a non-cutting edge product I am pretty sure I'd get fired. So can any game devs briefly/not-briefly explain why game dev like this takes so long? I am just curious to understand the dev cycle.
I'd assume that with investment, he'd have at least one person per team so all of these can largely be intertwined with each other but largely running at the same time.
Don't really have the context, but I'd trust the expert that it will get done on the schedule they want. I'd say people on the outside of things often ask these kinds of questions due to lacking any context on production schedules. See: the last time your PM said "can't we just..."
He's also a small shop and perhaps they intentionally move slower. I suspect he doesn't need to urgently get paid for this.
Story writing is probably non linear in time it takes, and I imagine there's a fair amount of waterfall. E.g you can't schedule voice actors until the story and dialogue is done. Oh wait, the voice actors have other commitments so they'll be by in 3 months. Etc.
I think you’re underrating the sheer amount of iteration that occurs. SaaS has requirements and then implementation- it’s a product that has a target it hits. Yes, churn happens, but the point is you’re working to a specific goal.
Games and any creative work isn’t like that. There’s constant iteration as new ideas come up or developers learn in play testing that certain parts of the game work better than others, and so they realign things continually and keep refining. I’m not a game dev btw, but blogs from devs show a continual cycle of refinement and feature creep.
At a quick glance: four months for the engine (which they wrote from scratch [1]) and, based on the budget [2], roughly nine months for crowdsourcing and pre-production (setting the overall story and puzzles, deciding on the look of the game, building small proofs-of-concept), seven months for production, three months for testing and bugfixing, and two months for release (which they overshot by three months).
In my experience, business software has narrow and predictable use cases. Note taking: You need to add, delete and update notes and the real meat of the product is usually in the note organization. Even SAP has use cases simple in nature: Account for milk cartons sold. The use cases just grow complex once you work in 30 countries or more. "Pay the right taxes on milk cartons sold" becomes tricky.
However, this is parallelizable: You can work on all 30 countries at once and ship when ready. You can work on taking and organizing notes in parallel. You can work on scaling in parallel. You can streamline UX in parallel while introducing tagging, or trees, or groups, or anything.
A game, and especially a narrative game, has an intrinsic linear component, the plot. You can work on a certain amount in parallel, sure: Once the rough shape of the plot is laid out, you can start working on assets, necessary engine features, sounds, dialog in parallel.
But you still have a strong need that a player or play tester has a good progression from act one to act two to act three, and a good progression from puzzle one to puzzle two to puzzle three. This takes a lot of very slow iteration.
This involves human testing by nature. You get a playtest every few months, if you have the money. You can easily throw more CI hardware to run your integration tests more often for more countries. Playtesters, especially those who don't know the game, are very, very limited.
Then you also want characters and settings to be consistent across the plot. If done well, this takes a lot of adjustments and refinement both back and forth. Sometimes the setting of Act three requires a character to have a certain trait, and that trait should be developed, so you now go back to Acts one and two to see if you can build up the character -- without knocking down the entire house of cards already in place.
And once you get to polish and atmosphere, it becomes even harder and more time consuming, because then you need new playtesters even more.
From a past job and working on some features, I spent a day or two presenting like 6-8 different options, and then spent half a day in different testing groups to figure out which procedural generation option "feels the best" for what the game designer wants. With a better spec, that could've been an hour. This made players more excited. Probably.
You need to build the engine/tech, need to support various platforms including building a rendering pipeline (so Vulkan, DirectX and Metal). You need to support animation (probably just 2D?), audio (including various effects and params), different types of input, a UI system, etc. To author the assets you need editors of some form for building the scenes, for cinematics, for the narrative, for the animations, a lot of these will be custom. Then to get the assets in the game you need a pipeline that coverts everything into platform specific formats. And all of this has to be performant, targeting 60fps ideally and cross platform.
That's just the tech side. Then you need all the other disciplines to be in sync. Can't start on animations until you have characters, can't start on those until you have concepts but can't have those until you have a narrative. And these will go via a lot of iterations as you try things out and figure out what works.
Then there's testing, the possibilities from a user perspective are really broad so the bug surface is massive. For a simple app the user is quite limited so it's simpler to enforce rules and unit tests. With a game a user can do a lot across many platforms and the issues can be on the low level graphics driver or just logic puzzle errors.
Then you have certification, platform holders have a book of tests they do to your game so you don't brick the console. Things like, does you game handle unplugging the console while you're saving to disk?
I can imagine they'll reuse a ton of tech from previous games, but there's always new things you need to do. Two years is actually pretty fast for the industry.
It's just like when during development the client/the users realize the system can do more and better, so the specs are changed because it makes a lot of sense to do that.
Game dev is always like that: you won't realize what works and what doesn't until you can actually playtest the game... then you'll think of fixes and you'll have to go back implementing them.
It was fun at the beginning but I got bored of it 2/3rds of the way in. The puzzles were an absolute chore to figure out and solve and the story kinda run out of steam.
I enjoyed Thimbleweed Park personally, however for all those old Monkey Island fans like myself I'd encourage you to read this[0] analysis of the game series and lore to uncover the secret of Monkey Island by DM81
I found it a really enjoyable read and a plausible take, so I thought it was worth sharing here
It's relevant as it's posted in the Thimbleweed Park forums ;)
38 comments
[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 21.1 ms ] threadVery good news. GOG provides offline installers so you can always backup, install, and play your games forever.
* 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.
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."
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.
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.
Agree that some moon logic is present/inevitable but I think the Gilbert games are friendlier than most in this respect.
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.
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.
meh -_-
Though Thimbleweed Park 1 was awesome in every way
I wish/hope someone else would take up the mantle of continuing the -spirit- of Monkey Island and make a new franchise with a similar rename: call it Ape Archipelago or something :)
First, there's a fridge that you can't open close to the ending of the game and that I understand as containing the body of the ghost character. I imagine there must be a way to open it, if only to give him closure.
Second, and related: given that the ending shows you a Basic prompt I imagine there has to be a way to use it for something other than restarting the game. I believe there was (for instance) a part of the game about getting a videotape but, once you had the right equipment, was no longer available to get. Perhaps those parts of the game can be unlocked if you know how to use the console to set the proper variables.
I've long hoped that we've all been getting the bad ending while there's a second one hidden somewhere (which has been hinted at [1]), but since I was fairly down after the ending I got I couldn't muster the energy to replay it all again.
> Thimbleweed Park 1 has possibly the worst ending of a game, ever.
I see that someone hasn't played the latest Monkey Island.
[1] https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/maniac_the_cave_thimbleweed...
The final scene of TP1; the one where they show the rising sun over a hill, that felt so at home for me. It was the only reason I played the game, to see that scene. Something about the colors reminded me of my childhood.
Of course I could just see it on youtube or a screenshot but I wanted it to feel natural, I wanted the story and characters to take me to that hill scene. That’s all I cared about.
Thimbleweek Park 1 was nothing but meta.
Return to Monkey Island was corpo art and meta. "The real treasure was the friends you made along the way, computer game player". Thanks Ron.
I've forgotten the ending of The Cave, it was probably meta too, but at least it had some good slapstick.
Not enmeshed in game development and have only done it very lightly: what takes a game like this 1.5 - 2 years to finish?
Like at a minimum, it's art, sound, graphics, and programming. If they are re-using assets, that's one of them ~done. So what's taking them 2 years?
My background is in SaaS type stuff and if I went to who hired me and said it would take 2 years to build out a non-cutting edge product I am pretty sure I'd get fired. So can any game devs briefly/not-briefly explain why game dev like this takes so long? I am just curious to understand the dev cycle.
I'd assume that with investment, he'd have at least one person per team so all of these can largely be intertwined with each other but largely running at the same time.
</not asking in a mean way>
He's also a small shop and perhaps they intentionally move slower. I suspect he doesn't need to urgently get paid for this.
Story writing is probably non linear in time it takes, and I imagine there's a fair amount of waterfall. E.g you can't schedule voice actors until the story and dialogue is done. Oh wait, the voice actors have other commitments so they'll be by in 3 months. Etc.
Games and any creative work isn’t like that. There’s constant iteration as new ideas come up or developers learn in play testing that certain parts of the game work better than others, and so they realign things continually and keep refining. I’m not a game dev btw, but blogs from devs show a continual cycle of refinement and feature creep.
https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/archives.html
At a quick glance: four months for the engine (which they wrote from scratch [1]) and, based on the budget [2], roughly nine months for crowdsourcing and pre-production (setting the overall story and puzzles, deciding on the look of the game, building small proofs-of-concept), seven months for production, three months for testing and bugfixing, and two months for release (which they overshot by three months).
[1] https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/roadmap1.html
[2] https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/budget1.html
However, this is parallelizable: You can work on all 30 countries at once and ship when ready. You can work on taking and organizing notes in parallel. You can work on scaling in parallel. You can streamline UX in parallel while introducing tagging, or trees, or groups, or anything.
A game, and especially a narrative game, has an intrinsic linear component, the plot. You can work on a certain amount in parallel, sure: Once the rough shape of the plot is laid out, you can start working on assets, necessary engine features, sounds, dialog in parallel.
But you still have a strong need that a player or play tester has a good progression from act one to act two to act three, and a good progression from puzzle one to puzzle two to puzzle three. This takes a lot of very slow iteration.
This involves human testing by nature. You get a playtest every few months, if you have the money. You can easily throw more CI hardware to run your integration tests more often for more countries. Playtesters, especially those who don't know the game, are very, very limited.
Then you also want characters and settings to be consistent across the plot. If done well, this takes a lot of adjustments and refinement both back and forth. Sometimes the setting of Act three requires a character to have a certain trait, and that trait should be developed, so you now go back to Acts one and two to see if you can build up the character -- without knocking down the entire house of cards already in place.
And once you get to polish and atmosphere, it becomes even harder and more time consuming, because then you need new playtesters even more.
From a past job and working on some features, I spent a day or two presenting like 6-8 different options, and then spent half a day in different testing groups to figure out which procedural generation option "feels the best" for what the game designer wants. With a better spec, that could've been an hour. This made players more excited. Probably.
You need to build the engine/tech, need to support various platforms including building a rendering pipeline (so Vulkan, DirectX and Metal). You need to support animation (probably just 2D?), audio (including various effects and params), different types of input, a UI system, etc. To author the assets you need editors of some form for building the scenes, for cinematics, for the narrative, for the animations, a lot of these will be custom. Then to get the assets in the game you need a pipeline that coverts everything into platform specific formats. And all of this has to be performant, targeting 60fps ideally and cross platform.
That's just the tech side. Then you need all the other disciplines to be in sync. Can't start on animations until you have characters, can't start on those until you have concepts but can't have those until you have a narrative. And these will go via a lot of iterations as you try things out and figure out what works.
Then there's testing, the possibilities from a user perspective are really broad so the bug surface is massive. For a simple app the user is quite limited so it's simpler to enforce rules and unit tests. With a game a user can do a lot across many platforms and the issues can be on the low level graphics driver or just logic puzzle errors.
Then you have certification, platform holders have a book of tests they do to your game so you don't brick the console. Things like, does you game handle unplugging the console while you're saving to disk?
I can imagine they'll reuse a ton of tech from previous games, but there's always new things you need to do. Two years is actually pretty fast for the industry.
I found it a really enjoyable read and a plausible take, so I thought it was worth sharing here
It's relevant as it's posted in the Thimbleweed Park forums ;)
-[0]: https://forums.thimbleweedpark.com/t/return-to-monkey-island...