How long exactly is this game ?

[Kuruseida]

Is there lots of extra stuff, secondary 'quests' or whatever ?
Cause I see there are people with gametimes of 10h, 25-30h and a few with 50h...

[Ray of Light]

https://howlongtobeat.com/game.php?id=44263

[Kuruseida]

Originally posted by Ray of Light:

https://howlongtobeat.com/game.php?id=44263

Thanks, I forgot about that site... so why some people has 25 hours ?

[Ray of Light]

I suppose they play the game again with another difficulty level

[LowLevel]

Originally posted by Shingatsu:

Is there lots of extra stuff, secondary 'quests' or whatever ?

I have played it a lot and there is more than one reason for this.

As the user "Ray of Light" said, I played the game both on its normal ("Hard") mode and in its limited ("Casual") mode. The first playthrough was 21 or 22 hours. The playthrough on "Casual" was about 10 hours, I think.

A second reason for the high quantity of hours is that Thimbleweed Park has a lot of extra content that exists only to create the atmosphere. The player can completely ignore these contents, if he/she wants to. Since I liked the atmosphere of the game very much, I enjoyed interacting with that extra content. For example, in the game there is a library of hundreds of short books and I enjoyed reading a lot of them; some of them were quite funny. There is also an arcade room in which you can play simple mini-games and a phone book that contains a lot of phone numbers that you can call to listen to the messages of their answering machines.

A third reason is that I wanted all the achievements and some of them require the player to do more stuff.

A fourth reason is that after finishing the two playthroughs, I eventually loaded a savegame to play a specific part of the game, sometimes because I didn't remember one detail and sometimes because I wanted to try something to see if there was an easter egg or more content to discover. I think that for those who, like me, became fan of the game to the point of discussing it in the official Thimbleweed Park forums[forums.thimbleweedpark.com], the quantity of time spent in re-playing short sections of the game to explore it all can be quite high.

If you sum all these reasons, you can understand why some people can spend a lot time in playing this game.

[Random Dan Random Snack Man.]

i am curently on my third playthrough of the game.
one for hard and casual and now once for just looking around finding anything i havent already and getting the last achivements.

[Kuruseida]

I see, thanks for explaining @LowLevel !
Could you tell me more about the difficulties? Why you say the 'normal' mode is actually hard ? That 'casual' mode is even harder than HARD ('normal') ????? Why is the 'casual' mode so short compared to the other one(s?)...

[Kuruseida]

@Pasta Masta also gives to think that casual goes after the hard... wasn't casual supposed to be ""K-SHUL""" ?

[LowLevel]

Originally posted by Shingatsu:

Could you tell me more about the difficulties? Why you say the 'normal' mode is actually hard ? That 'casual' mode is even harder than HARD ('normal') ????? Why is the 'casual' mode so short compared to the other one(s?)...

Sorry, I wasn't clear about the difficulties.

There are two modes.

The first one is officially called "Hard mode" and I unofficially call it "normal mode" because it has all the puzzles, all the characters, all the locations, all the easter eggs, etc. Practically, it's the full version of the game and that's why I consider it the "normal" one.

The second mode is officially called "Casual mode". It's easier because the more difficult puzzles have been removed from it and as a consequence it also has less characters, less locations and less easter eggs. Practically, it's a reduced and simplified version of the game.

I wanted to experience the full game and the full story first and that's why the first time I played it "on Hard" (meaning on the "Hard mode"). My second playthrough was "on Casual" (meaning that I played the "Casual mode").

In the adventure game "Monkey Island 2" (also by Ron Gilbert) there is something similar:

http://www.mobygames.com/images/shots/l/501394-monkey-island-2-lechuck-s-revenge-fm-towns-screenshot-two.png

[s-m-k]

It took me about 18 hours to beat the game on hard, admittedly with a few hints to determine what to focus on and sometimes to give some clues where I was stuck. I can't believe people beat it in 14 hours on average the first time, unless it's casual mode. There's simply too many distractions and red herrings. I've spent ages trying to figure out stuff too early etc. Though I used this game to cope with my jetlag, so dunno :D