I know as much as the next gal that classic adventure games aren’t for everyone. But if you were thinking of dipping your toe in the genre, Thimbleweed Park is a great place to start – because you’re starting at the finish, almost. The game was created by Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick, who worked on some of the most famous adventure games to come out of Lucasfilm (later LucasArts).

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We’re all invited back to the strange town of Thimbleweed Park for a free new little spin-off. Over the weekend, Ron Gilbert and pals released Delores: A Thimbleweed Park Mini-Adventure, a new story standalone story which grew out of a prototype for Gilbert’s next game engine. And it’s free for everyone to play, whether you own the original or not. And if you do want the original, that’s discounted on sale right now too.

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The latest game going free on the Epic Games Store is Thimbleweed Park, 2017’s retro reunion of Maniac Mansion creators Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick. It’s a point ‘n’ click adventure game in ye olde waye, with jokes and puzzles and pixels and a SCUMM-like ‘select actions from a menu’ sorta interface, and it’s pretty good. For free, mate, get in.

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The Total War games have a tradition, so they can dodge the censors and get a lower age rating, of toning down the gore then releasing a big bucket of blood and mutilation as paid DLC. That way, teens still get to murder but adults can see the full consequences of murder. Now Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick’s retro point ‘n’ clicker Thimbleweed Park has seemingly followed suit. Well, with swearing, not decapitation. If you wish to hear Ransome the *Beeping* Clown swearing his teeth out, you may now pay $2 for DLC to remove the censoring beeps from his dialogue. (more…)

Adventure game remakes are common. But not everyone likes to see their old favourites revived. Mitch Kocen asked veteran point-and-clickmen Ron Gilbert and Tim Schafer, among others, when they think it s OK to remaster the classics>

Without intervention, every video game you have ever loved will eventually become unplayable. The technology that enables the next generation of games cripples the last. At some point, systems simply can t run slowly enough to support games made decades prior. For many years, it wasn t possible to (legally) play older games without digging out the old computer gathering dust in your basement. Fortunately, there is a resurgence of classic games on modern hardware. These re-releases often come with new (or improved) graphics and sound, and sometimes include the option to view the game in its original form. Yet some creators are concerned that these changes compromise the game s original artistic vision. (more…)

You can now play old-school arcade games within old-school adventure game Thimbelweed Park [official site]. Cool-a-reno. The town’s arcade was previously just a facade, but now you can snoop inside and pop a token into such 8-bit delights as Meteor Menace, Space Slime and Die! Enemy Scumm!

But, like the rest of Thimbleweed Park, it’s not quite as straightforward as you might hope. You’ll have to solve puzzles to get access to those tokens, creator Ron Gilbert said on Twitter. The arcade is only available in the game’s hard mode as well, so expect those puzzles to bend your mind.

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I’m constantly getting stuck in Thimbleweed Park [official site], the old-school adventure game from the creators of Maniac Mansion, Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick. I always seem to have an inventory full of loose popcorn, soot, a t-shirt and some dynamite with no clue as to how to combine them in order to get ice cream cake to a hungry ghost.

I thought I was just being dense, but it turns out that I’m not the only one who’s had issues. Fans and critics have remarked that the game needed a hint system and the team has, somewhat reluctantly, obliged. And not just any old hint system: a proper hint hotline you can call from the in-game phones, reminiscent of the real gaming hint lines of the ’80s.

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My very first interaction in Thimbleweed Park [official site], and most likely anyone else’s, was to “Look at Willie.” I don’t know who I’m playing yet, nor who Willie might be, but my German accented chap has appeared on a screen with two interactive items: a gate, and a slumped drunken man called Willie. So I looked at him, he being potentially more interesting than a gate, presuming that my character would inform me that either he knew this man and needed to speak to him, or that he did not. I got neither. Because “Look at Willie” speaks to him. … [visit site to read more]

In Thimbleweed Park [official site], few things are what they appear to be. The game, which reunites Ron Gilbert with his Maniac Mansion co-designer Gary Winnick, is a point and click comedy-mystery that looks like a relic from the past. Or, more accurately, like memories of the past; it has handsome lighting and a level of visual detail that actually fills in the blanks that memory often papers over.

Attractive as it is, should such pixels please your eye, it’s the quality of the story and the puzzles that really count. On one of those fronts, Thimbleweed eventually finds a way to go above and beyond anything I expected from it, but the combination of broad jokes and mystery-thriller sometimes creates confusion and frustration in both the narrative and the puzzling along the road.

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Thimbleweed Park [official site], the new adventure game from Maniac Mansion creators Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick, finally has a release date. On March 30th, two-and-a-quarter years after the game’s crowdfunding campaign ended, we’ll be welcomed into the small town of Thimbleweed Park to investigate murder and other strange goings-on. It’ll bring puzzles, chat, jokes, japes – y’know, stuff you’d broadly expect from the reunion of a pair of LucasArts adventure veterans. … [visit site to read more]