I think this is supposed to be old-school difficulty levels, so I may find it as frustrating as Maniac Mansion!
Okay, I got a little bit into this and wow. It is intentionally daunting and rough around the edges. You've got characters to swap between but who are in the same location a lot of the time, it makes you walk a long way down a highway or pathways to get where you want to go (and if you want to try out an idea for opening the tomb at the end of the cemetery you'd better be confident because it takes a good half minute and several clicks to walk there from the front gate with no hotspots in between), I've already had to draw out a little map of the town so I can remember where all the different shops and stuff are to avoid wandering around for ages every time I have an idea, there's junk lying by the side of the road like empty bottles and Atari cartridges that you can pick up but are useless, it uses the old-school SCUMM verb bar with 9 verbs ever-present at the bottom of the screen and the help screen doesn't even tell you the keyboard shortcuts instead just advising you to find them yourself. Add to that the presentation, with the prettied up Maniac Mansion graphics and the idiosyncratic VO (stilted Dragnet voices, strong German accents, characters who put '-ino' at the end of their words a lot), it's a game that isn't trying to give you a smooth experience. It wants to poke and prod at you, in a very old-school Ron Gilbert way.
Having said that, it does put effort into not unintentionally annoying you - with right clicks and shortcuts, the verb UI isn't too bad, there are an impressive amount of responses to player actions, and the game will often move a following character around when it's clearly the most logical thing to happen, or remind you that a certain action is available again.
It's also incredibly nostalgia-driven - lots of jokes about Lucasfilm and callbacks to old games (I've already found a chainsaw and some chainsaw fuel located in such a way they can never be used together, and there's a mansion that is very reminiscent of the Maniac one) and a lot of the set-up immediately takes you back, like when you get to a row of arcade games and there's a token dispensing machine that seems to exist wholly to get your hopes up before telling you it's empty.
On the whole, I'm really enjoying it so far, in a way I didn't think I would from the initial abrasive nature of it. I've done lots of stuff and not got stuck yet, the way the mysteries of the story unfold are really great - needling little bits of information from people, suddenly getting thrown into playable flashbacks from the middle of dialogue trees - and there have been a few clever puzzles and very funny moments. And it feels very densely packed in a good way. A bit of a shame that multiple characters will often give the same lines when interacting with stuff, but overall lots of pleasing detail. I suspect that as soon as I hit a dead end with all my puzzles then it will immediately be the most frustrating game ever, but we'll see. There is at least an in-game hint system, but you need a working phone for it and I'm not sure if I've actually found one of those outside the flashbacks yet.
Speaking of which, I'm kind of surprised that there's not only a hint system but a to do list, both of which don't seem to tally with the old-school vibe of the game. I personally feel that if you need to put an actual hint system in your game, that's a sign that you haven't done your signposting properly; at the very least you could disguise it by having characters you can ask for advice (like a Dan or a Dead Ted Edison). And I generally don't like To Do lists, especially in this type of game where you can always go back and ask the characters to repeat their vital information; they always break the magic for me, reduce everything to abstract keys and locks. At least this one doesn't have any sounds and graphics come up when it updates (god I hate that pencil scribble sfx) and makes you look at your notepad from your inventory for it so it all feels a bit more diegetic.
I can see the reasoning behind them with modern adventure games - people can look at an online walkthrough in seconds anyway, and people have so many games to play and so little time that they'll often take longer breaks between play sessions of any given game and more easily forget all the puzzle threads. But they're often used unnecessarily, I think.
Still really enjoying this! It keeps on opening up - a map gets you more locations, and now I've got five playable characters each with their own to do list, one of whom is in the ghost realm version of the locations - and I haven't got stuck yet but I always feel like my adventure gamer brain is getting a workout. This may jinx it but I really feel like I'm attuned to the game's puzzle design. Not sure how far through I am, but currently the game feels pleasingly big, like it's going to be Grim Fandango size.
Speaking of the to do lists, I can see now that they were a bit more necessary than usual seeing as each character has their own objectives. Plus, they don't get really granular like with, say, the Deponia games where every objective and sub-objective is laid out in a big diagram so you feel like you're just progressing through a design flowchart. One slight niggle with them is that as I get new characters, they come ready with to do items that I don't understand the motivation for, which feels a bit cheaty. But perhaps I'll learn the motivations as I start to look around and it'll be a nice storytelling technique, we'll see...
Finished. It got a tiny bit frustrating when I was stuck on a puzzle and the game had narrowed down enough that I was bottlenecked - at that point you're having to wander around a lot to see if anything inspires you. Thanks to Ron Gilbert's penchant for having to use different characters in different ways, and no way to instantly transfer items or jump to locations, this can involve a LOT of clicking down long streets and winding map roads and manoeuvring characters and items around just to see if one particular combination works. That didn't happen much, though - there were only two puzzles that I needed the hint guide for and which I actually had the correct solution in mind but were a little unfair imo (one due to a location unlocking in the very short time since I last checked it, and one where I assumed ghosts wouldn't be able to use phones themselves as they can't pick up the receivers).
It got really exciting towards the end, getting all the characters to work together on a single puzzle (could have done with more of that, actually) and getting into the big factory that's been taken over by an AI.
Unfortunately, it then grinds to a halt with an incredibly frustrating ending - Dolores' uncle reveals that he found out you're all characters in an adventure game, gives you all the items you need to finish your storylines, and tells you to go to the Kickstarter demo version and kill the machine there so that the game is wiped and the Thimbleweed Park devs can't reset and make you all start again. You just walk each one to an NPC, give them an item and get a ten second wrap-up, then Dolores goes into a placeholder art version of the game and you flip eight switches on the evil machine and the credits immediately roll. Then an unseen dev uses a C64 interface to reload the game and you go back to the menu screen. And that's it. "Ha ha, all the stuff you cared about either doesn't get resolved or gets resolved in an intentionally rushed manner and then the game ends because the game ends." I don't really find that satisfying or clever or funny. It's the same thing that annoyed me about the She-Hulk tv show ending - I'd rather they just did the actual ending than a post-modern thumbing of the nose to the dreary concept of satisfying storytelling. (Movies like Wayne's World or Labyrinth are smart enough to manage both, which is great.) And even the 'logic' of the post-modern stuff didn't really make sense.
Just a massive letdown and if I were marking out of ten it would knock the game down a point or even two.
Rating: a (mostly intentionally) rough diamond, with a terrible ending
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