It is worth saying that the game turned out to be a level higher than what I expected from it. I will not pretend that I am a fan of the genre and that I played all the classic games from the developers of the Thimbleweed Park game that came out a long time ago and were straight classics of this genre. No, I myself saw only a glimpse of The Cave from all the projects of the studio, but I didn’t even play it myself, and those games that made developers popular came out in the 90s and I somehow missed them, because even I didn’t go to school then.
So when I launched Thimbleweed Park, I expected only good feelings from completing the quest, I didn’t feel any affection or emotions from returning to the product in pixel form, I don’t have an emotional attraction to Twin Peaks, which seems to be connected with this game with its color and some story lines. So today we’re going to take a look at Thimbleweed Park, a pixel game that raised $625,000 on Kickstarter and has already won over a lot of players.
Story line
Perhaps this is the most interesting detail in the entire game, over which the developers directly worked. The fact is that when playing the game, you will, in fact, read a good detective story, only you yourself will still participate in it. The game begins with the fact that we are shown a very strange death of a character and they give us two more heroes that we will control and solve puzzles.
It is the investigation of the death of the first character in the game that is part of the storyline, the main one, but after just an hour and a half of the game we are given so many side tasks, riddles, so many individual motives of the characters that I even forgot about how the game started. You have to keep a lot in mind, you can even write something in a notebook for yourself, since there is a huge game world, a lot of characters, and all this is really captivating.
Control
The game provides you with a conditionally open world where you can travel from location to location. This allows you to explore the virtual world, look for clues, communicate with characters, get some items and solve puzzles, while the clue can be anything – the inscription on a piece of paper, the location of objects, and so on. You control the mouse if you play on a computer, on the console or smartphone control using sticks. Fortunately, the toy is not active and there is no need to rush to hit the target, you can safely go through level after level.
Atmosphere
I liked the game feeling from the passage. If you have ever read a good detective story, then you understand me – a lot of small details, a lot of dialogues, communication and jokes, different characters, personal motives, all this develops in the vastness of the town, where there are many interesting locations and features of this or that subject.
You get a huge puzzle that you need to put together from pieces, scraps and details, which then all together will allow you to solve the riddle and find the culprit. It is difficult to describe, but there is a feeling that you are an investigator yourself and are investigating a very interesting case.
Outcome
Of course, the game has some features that many may not like. For example, there are pixel graphics here and in some places there is a feeling that the developers simply did not think through some moments with locations. On the other hand, this is the style of the product, and an indie developer simply cannot afford cooler graphics.
Here you need to immerse yourself in the plot, I didn’t have time to read and remember everything, think, understand and get a ton of pleasure from it. By the way, I advise you to take a high level of difficulty, so it will be more interesting to play.
Unfortunately, Thimbleweed Park has incorporated not only the advantages of the old games, but also some disadvantages. For example, the interface in the game and, in particular, the controls are very inconveniently implemented on the DualShock 4 controller. In order for the character to perform some specific action, you need to select the appropriate phrase from the list below, then point the stick at the object and start interacting. At first.
everything seems more or less tolerable, but after a few hours of such control, you start to get very tired, although the desires of the developers to comply with the old school in everything are understandable, but not justified. It would be much more logical if we could choose in the settings which type of control to use: classic or updated. A similar thing can be seen in the same Red Comrades Save the Galaxy: Reloaded, where the choice of controls had a positive effect on the game.
In addition to the two main main characters, as we progress through, we are allowed to play for three additional characters. These include very different personalities, such as the evil swearword-loving clown Ransome, the girl who dreams of becoming a game developer Delores, and the ghost Franklin who just wants to hang out with her daughter. Each hero is added to the game very organically and at the same time fits into the storyline.
Although the characters seem completely different at first glance, they are connected in one way or another, which is revealed by a careful reading of the dialogues. It is important to note that the game is focused on entertaining us not just by finding the killer of the same person who was found in the river, but first of all by unusual stories taking place in Thimbleweed Park. As a result, you can completely forget about the corpse in the river for a while, since the story every time throws us new challenges.
As in any other quest, our main occupation as we progress is pixel hunting. It is noteworthy that not all items are used in Thimbleweed Park – some are just for fun. The main goal in the game is to collect all six clues, after which a special computer will give the exact name of the killer. However, before finding all the clues, we have to get acquainted with a lot of strange characters, who are accompanied by even stranger events.
