The game doesn't launch and merely indicates "Running...", which is the first time I've had this issue on Steam out of my entire Steam library. (Windows 10, High-spec computer) This forces me to force-close it in the Windows task manager after leaving it sitting there for 5 minutes.

Under the Support section, the devs seem to suggest wonderfully helpful solutions such as verifying the integrity of the game cache (no errors detected) or to send them an e-mail at their support desk just in order to get their bloody game to run (Come on now, how much more difficult could it be to mess up a game which looks as technically complicated as something made in ScummVM?).

Well, I'm sorry, but I have no intention of wasting my time sitting through your stupid tech support. As of this moment, I own 188 games on Steam and I'd much rather play one of the other 187 games which actually work, than to sit down and compose romantic epistles to some underpaid drudge who probably spends all her or his time dealing with compatibility issues like these (judging from how many people are asking for technical support for this game). I'm trying to enjoy myself, not create more work for myself by beta testing your damn game for you.

Annoying as hell humor in this game. A character who ends their sentences in random words is supposed to be funny? The characters even comment on how annoying this is... if even the writers find it annoying, why did they choose to give this character so many lines and be all over the place in the game? There's also a clown that swears a lot and that's the whole joke. Hilarious. I guess kids might find it funny, but it was totally insufferable to me.

Short version:

First you break the fourth wall. Then you break the third, mistaking it for the fourth, as well. Then, the second and the first. And then you get squashed by the falling roof.




Longer version:

The designers are quite apt at what they attempt to pull off here, and never is there any doubt that they are doing it on purpose. However, it is a completely different question, whether they are doing it for better or worse.

I expected TP to be a retro-styled adventure game, with well-written dialogue, likable characters and clever puzzles. In addition, I was pretty much sure that, coming from the mind of Ron Gilbert, it would feature lots of references, some thinly disguised whining about the genre’s ill fate, and an unhealthy dose of in-jokes.

I sincerely hoped that, having been created by industry veterans, TP would offer a unique view on puzzle design, some fresh intelligent mechanics, and a stellar story I’d remember for the next decade or two.

Well, guess what? Thimbleweed Park is exactly what I expected it to be, and absolutely not what I hoped it would be. An obnoxiously nostalgic, unbearably meta, quite self-indulgent, slightly better-than-mediocre imitation of the graphic adventures of the golden era, laden with mildly amusing writing, some nice puzzles and an ending that is even uglier than Monkey Island 2’s (which is an achievement in itself). Astonishingly, I suspect that it’s just what the community wants right now.

I am so torn with this game...
The graphics and animations are awesome and the game mechanics perfect for an adventure.
Even the voice acting is great.
But.. It's just not funny
Watch the trailer with the clown. If you laughed there, you will like the game. Also stop reading.
If not, chances are you won't find it funny. It is it's kind of humor.

Some things just makes no sense.
The Menu-Text, first thing you see, is the only thing rendered in high-res, not fitting in.
For once, I chose hard mode, but had to click through a "tutorial" where it was explained that you can use the text-commands with objectives in the big pictures by big arrows pasted on that screenshot. Not explained in game or for me to find out. Just a screenshot after you hit "start"
You constantly switch between characters without any sense, the story is told in a strange way.

And this constant fourth-wall-breaking of almost every character.
Yeah, haha. The corpse is pixealting, the objects is rendered in a higher resolution then older games, I can talk with characters about the auto-save option and some punches to other point and click adventures are thrown totaly out of character and sometimes I am adressed directly as a player, telling me how much effort was put in this game, to a point it makes me feel unconfortable and wanting to write an personal thank you note for doing a good job.

But not in a way it would fit or enrichens the world. It seems just to be in it, to be "funny".
It feels like no one was feeling the jokes. Just like: "yeah, throw that in, people will laugh. Simon the sorcerer pulled it off, too. Awesome, a reference to another game sitting in the audience, makes no sence but it is funny and we had no other place to put it in but had to for some reason"

I played it for two hours and never had the feeling that I did something that I had to combine in a way that makes me think or I would go "haha" for it's strangeness/funniness/originality/anything. It's almost boring and seems to lead to nothing. But a lot of fourth-wall-breaking. Although the game haven't earned that right to me, to make so easy jokes..

It's all too much, too crowded, not feeling like a whole and simply not classy about it's humor.

But the nostalgia is high. I wished it would really feel like a game from that age when I opend it today. But jokes saying "this computer here is so good, as it would be from the future in 2017" - haha, funny.. because it is actually 2017 now, or something.
I really want to love that game. But it is making it so hard for me.
Maybe I try again tomorrow.
But it is somehow breaking my heart, because, except from it's marvelous graphics, great sound/voiceacting, awesome mechanics, it's just not an great adventure trying way too hard :(

I thought I would like Thimbleweed and that it would be a fun modern throwback game. However, I find myself getting easily bored; I don't like most of the characters. Other players might enjoy it but I just can't get into it. Some point I'll clear it but feels like a tedious slog. Yes, I understand these point and click games and how they work but this one just didn't mesh with me.

This game is full of pseudointellectual bullexcrement that shows little respect for the player.

It has a few funny moments, a few good puzzles, but mostly it just shows what boomers are like when they run out of good ideas, but still think they're relevant - they complain. The whole game is just a protest to "but in the good old days". Just shut the heck up and go play Tangle Tower, Oxenfree, Return of the Obra Dinn, Night in the Woods, Unforeseen Incidents, The Red Strings Club, Va-11 Hall-A, Talos Principle, Disco Elysium, Pathologic 2, Cathy Ryan, Detective Grimoire, Life is Strange, Dropsy, Primordia, The Council (Ep1-3), Gemini Rue, or even Paradigm.

And look forward to My Work Is Not Yet Done, or Backbone, or anything else.

After playing 6 hours, I realized I don't care about this game at all.

I don't get it. Not much fun for me. Sorry.

I tried. I really, really tried. But Ron Gilbert absolutely was not kidding when he labeled the in-jokes in the Options menu as "annoying."

I'm generally a fan of adventure games, particularly one with tongue-in-cheek metahumor, but this is excruciating. It's a joyless slog of a game that's so afraid of its script standing by itself that it distracts you with a million non-sequitur jabs at other fanchises - the same kind of insecure catcalls used in similar gaming pariah Duke Nukem Forever.

It's not enough that a character make a risky move involving sharp objects, then make a crack about other games would have immediately killed her off. You must then endure a thirty-second lecture, specifically impugning Sierra, berating the player about how terrible they were about it, and about how LucasArts perfected the art of adventure game design that you have come to know and love.

Then be nagged incessantly about what puzzle you're supposed to be solving, because you dared to explore the world around you instead of going straight to the puzzles.

The hint system is an intrusive irritant that slaps you if you idle for thirty seconds. Player characters will cut out their final bits of dialogue to yell at you to switch characters, or move to the next plot point, or get that plot token. The game feels annoyed that you would immerse yourself in the adventure, afraid that you will see the frayed ends of each frame, and seemingly every screen has been plastered with signs advertising a hint line you can call if you don't figure out the answer in under thirty seconds. It is actively condescending, an everpresent irritation that rips you away from any interest you have in the game world, going so far as to present a tutorial for *how to play an adventure game* that even recent Telltale games refrain from doing.

All for a cheeky Twin Peaks-style mystery that can't help but nudge you in the ribs every few seconds and remind you YOU'RE PLAYING AN OLD-SCHOOL ADVENTURE GAME. ISN'T THAT COOL?

Sam and Max had greater subtlety.

I tried for two and a half hours, just past the refund point. I've grit my teeth past two and a half hours of poorly-implemented adventure game verbs. I've sighed my way through a script written by self-important game developers quite literally telling me how good they are at game design instead of letting the game speak for itself.

I've heard this game's ending is a miserable morass of meta-"humor."

But I'm just too needled to care.

In spite of many great elements, this game feels tired, soulless, and derivative, and I really can't recommend playing it. I am a huge fan of old-school adventure games from Sierra, LucasArts, and even the smaller indie games or other games from Interplay. There were certainly frustrating elements in those games, but there was a lot of soul. This is not just nostalgia speaking--I have recently played some of those games and still love them. So with that background, I really have to disagree with people recommending this for adventure fans--do yourself a favor and replay a classic instead, or find a hidden gem you never played when it came out. Or even (despite some issues with it), play Broken Age.

The game has great art and production values, and didn't skimp on content, but the writing is really bad (other than the beginning and end). They advertised it as similar to HBO dramas or Twin Peaks, but it was too childish for that, and the writing was nowhere even close to that quality (and so many recent indie games really do have high quality writing). Most of the game felt like filler. The characters weren't really fleshed out, and all players and NPCs felt like archetypes more than people. Despite having quite a few playable characters, there wasn't really anything to help us get to know and root for them. Almost all dialogue was puzzle-related, other than many tired references to old LucasArts games and wink-wink references to the 80s. The humor was almost all completely copied from other games, and not much felt too original.

The exceptions to this were the very beginning and the very end. The intro was tightly done, and immediately took us to two main characters. We also were introduced to playable flashbacks (a great concept) that did a great job providing background. Then we got about 6-7 hours of exposition-free puzzle play (the puzzles were reasonable, but with no substance, it was pretty tedious). Finally, at the end, it became interesting again. Not just because of the way they wrapped up the story (and finally connected it to twin peaks in ways other than periodic static-y TVs and a single reference to cherry pie), but also because they started truly moving each character's story forward again and once more I started to care.

Another writing-related issue is "dialogue as puzzle" vs "dialogue as exposition". Old adventure games have elaborate dialogue trees that you have to traverse to explore puzzles. This was kind of like that, except most of the dialogue was repetitive and basically added to give enough options. Aside from that, I've become spoiled by games like OxenFree, One Night Stand, To the Moon, and FireWatch, where the dialogue primarily serves as exposition, and when choices in the dialogue exist, they affect the game. In this case, no dialogue choice affected game, and most diaologue was more puzzle-related and offered little real exposition.

I think this game would have been fantastic if they had hired more writers to really flesh out the dialogue and either eliminated the middle, or actually figured out important plot vs just mindless puzzles. A lot of adventure games would alternate between puzzle-heavy sections, and short periods of exposition. They could have done that too, although I would have preferred even the puzzle sections to advance the games. Finally, they should cut down on the references (some is good) and either make the tone completely serious, or do a better job with humor.

Even though I don't recommend this, I think that it has a lot of positives, and the creative team is behind many of my favorite LucasArts games, so I will definitely try another game they make. But next time, I hope they put a little more effort into the writing.