Thimbleweed Park is a point-and-click adventure game developed and published by Terrible Toybox for Linux, macOS, Windows, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, iOS, Nintendo Switch, Android, and Amazon Luna. The game was revealed on November 18, 2014, along with a Kickstarter crowd-funding campaign with a goal of US$375,000, and was released on March 30, 2017. The game is a spiritual successor to lead designers Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick's previous games Maniac Mansion (1987) and The Secret of Monkey Island (1990), and is designed to be similar to graphic adventure games released in that time period, both visually and in gameplay. The game itself contains numerous oblique references to events and characters from Maniac Mansion and Zak McKracken, loosely suggesting these games to be set in a shared setting. A sequel is scheduled for a 2028 release, and will be funded through an unorthodox arrangement.
Gameplay
Thimbleweed Park operates on the same principles of early graphic adventure games. Players navigate various scenes from a third person perspective, using various "verb commands" to perform actions, such as "use", "pick up", and "talk to". Verb commands can be used to perform actions such as allowing a character to pick up an object into their inventory, to converse with another character, or to use an object on another item. The game's story is played out across a series of chapters, in which players must complete a specific set of goals to advance to the next chapter, solving a series of puzzles, some of which require the use of more than one character. The game features five different player characters, with the ability to switch between them in the middle of gameplay, similarly to Maniac Mansion.
Plot In 1987, FBI agents Angela Ray and Antonio Reyes arrive at the town of Thimbleweed Park to investigate a murder. Their investigation leads them to several persons of interest: Chuck Edmund, the recently deceased owner of the PillowTronics robotics company; Ransome the Clown, cursed to wear his makeup forever after going too far in his insulting performances; Delores Edmund, computer programmer and niece of Chuck; and Delores's downtrodden father Franklin. Franklin attempts to pitch his business ideas to Chuck, but is murdered at the town hotel and becomes a ghost. Delores discovers that Chuck has written her out of his will, angered by her choice to pursue a career in video games. Ray and Reyes gather blood samples, fingerprints, and photographic evidence, and arrest vagrant Willie T. Wino, who protests his innocence. They leave town, but return incognito to pursue other agendas: Ray has been tasked with stealing computer secrets, and Reyes wants to clear his father of causing the fire that burnt down the PillowTronics factory. Ray, Reyes, Delores and Ransome infiltrate the factory. Delores disables the security systems and discovers that Chuck has uploaded his personality into the factory computer. Chuck reveals that everyone in the town is trapped inside a video game that keeps repeating, and that the group must free themselves by deleting the game. Ransome apologises to the citizens of Thimbleweed Park, clearing his reputation. Franklin says goodbye to his daughter and disappears to the afterlife. In the local paper, Reyes publishes a confession from Chuck clearing his father of blame for the factory fire. Ray steals a game design document from game designer Ron Gilbert and is transferred out of the game by her employers. Delores enters the "wireframe world", a prototype version of Thimbleweed Park with simplistic graphics, and shuts down the computer. The free 2020 spin-off minigame Delores (see below) provides what could be seen as an epilogue chapter and puts a less surreal and overall more positive spin on the story.
Development On November 18, 2014, Gilbert posted an update to his blog, in which he revealed that talks about the game had begun "several months ago" while he and Winnick had been discussing how fun their time developing Maniac Mansion at LucasArts (Lucasfilm Games at the time) had been, and how they liked the "charm, simplicity and innocence" of the adventure games of that era. Winnick proposed that they should make a new game in the style of their old ones; as such, it is designed as if it had been made in 1987 and as if it were "an undiscovered LucasArts adventure game you've never played before". Gilbert agreed, and suggested that they should crowd-fund it on Kickstarter. Development started with Gilbert and Winnick building the game's world and story, designing puzzles using puzzle dependency charts, and creating characters around the puzzles. From the start, Gilbert says, they wanted to parody the TV shows Twin Peaks, The X-Files, and True Detective. The game's production was planned to last for 18 months, with Gilbert programming, Winnick producing art, and both writing and designing. Six months into development, an additional artist and programmer was hired along with a part-time musician. Development began on January 2, 2015, and was accompanied by a podcast that documented development and included some of their weekly check-in meetings.
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