Upon starting a new game in Thimbleweed Park, you’re given the option of casual or hard mode. To be quite honest, Hard Mode is kind of tedious at parts.. but it also contains a lot of content that isn’t in casual mode. For this LP, we’ll be playing on Hard.
The year is 1987… not coincedentally the same year Maniac Mansion was released.
Welcome to the tiny town of Thimbleweed Park, located.. somewhere in the United States.
The spritework in this game is fucking amazing, by the way. You can tell a lot of effort was put into it, especially on screens like this one.
Oh hey, it’s another adventure game in which a bum is among the first characters introduced. Unfortunately, this is not a game in which we play as a drunken hobo. What do you think this is, Gravity Rush?
And here comes our protagonist now. The artstyle in this game is very similar to Maniac Mansion’s, and looks surprisingly good given how poorly Maniac Mansion aged.
: “It says to come to the bridge down by the river.”
Yep! Sounds totally legit, nothing at all strange about meeting a bum underneath a bridge. Maybe I was wrong - maybe we ARE playing as a drunken hobo, only he’s undercover as someone who isn’t a drunken hobo so no one sends him to rehab. He’s probably just doing the German accent to throw people off.
Now we get access to the full GUI. We’ve got four items: a note, a wallet, a hotel passcard, and.. a stuffed bear? As a side note, this is essentially the standard SCUMM engine GUI - SCUMM stands for Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion and was the engine that Maniac Mansion (as well as games like the first Sam & Max, Full Throttle, and Curse of Monkey Island) ran on.
Okay yeah, we’re playing as some guy who is quite clearly too dumb to live. I feel like Alton would have gotten this message and gone “Wait.. what?” and that guy’s a dumb asshole who collects Nickelback CDs.
Our first order of business is opening the gate, which is unlocked.
Let’s try talking to the bum. Maybe this really is some kind of secret bum meeting.
Well, that was a productive conversation. Unfortunately, Boris won’t leave this area without finding the person he’s supposed to meet with, so we won’t have a chance to buy some whisky and become an enabler. Detective Halligan this guy is not.
Here, we have our first inventory item of the game - a rock. If hours of playing Rust taught me anything, it’s that you can use the rock to build a house and then eventually have it torched by a group of fifteen year olds wielding AKs.
There’s no visible switch for the light above the sign, so we’ll just have to do this gangsta style.
I didn’t choose the thug life, the thug life chose me. This is very much a Ron Gilbert puzzle, by the way.
Just east of the sign is a patch of really dense overgrowth, which again is pretty amazing as spritework goes.
See that downed tree that’s blocking the sewer? This is the first spot where Hard Mode kicks in - on casual, that tree isn’t there. We can’t do anything with it yet, however. Also, I kind of want to examine the bear before we move on. What’s the deal with that thing, anyway?
…Okay. If you say so. Let’s just move on, and…
Well, Boris is dead and currently being dragged off into the woods, presumably to be eaten and/or buried in a shallow grave. Better restart and maybe grab a gun this time.
Or not.
Man, it sure is Twin Peaks around here. Also, is it just me, or does that body look almost nothing like the guy we just saw get murdered?
By the way, there actually is an FBI office in Albuquerque that has been open since 1949, according to the FBI’s own website. Sure, it’s not the FBI’s “home office” (that would be the one in DC) but it actually wouldn’t be too weird for someone to refer to it that way.
: “It’s need-to-know.”
: “Look… I like working a case alone.”
: “I especially don’t need some junior agent messing up my investigation.”
: “Especially some junior agent who thinks I don’t know that there isn’t a home office in Albuquerque.”
: “So stay out of my way…”
: “Take a lot of notes…”
: “Sit back and learn..”
: “And I’ll wrap up this case and we can both get the hell out of here.”
Meet Ray and Reyes, our protagonists for the rest of the game. Unlike Maniac Mansion, neither one of them possesses any skills the other doesn’t - but we’ll need both of them to progress through the game.
: “It’s how it was intended.”
: “I’m sure it was.”
: “Starting…”
: “To…”
: “Pixelate…”
Next update, we’ll start Ray and Reyes on their investigation in earnest, and learn how Thimbleweed Park expects us to handle two characters at once.