It's been a long time since Ron Gilbert's made a classic adventure game, but that might be changing, assuming you want to help kick a few bucks his way. Gilbert and Gary Winnick co-created Maniac Mansion, and want to fund a spiritual successor called Thimbleweed Park on Kickstarter.

The duo are asking for $375,000 to develop Thimbleweed Park. It's slightly ambitious, given some recent high-profile misfires on the service. As of this writing, it's raised nearly $70,000. It'll probably be okay.

Thimbleweed Park is apparently a super weird place, and there's been a murder. Two detectives are sent to investigate, and players swap between the lives of five characters as the mysteries start to add up.

Unlike some other nostalgic trips on Kickstarter, Thimbleweed Park doesn't want to update adventure games for 2014 and beyond. No, Thimbleweed Park is meant to be a trip back to 1980s adventure game design in every sense of the word.

"Why do we want to make Thimbleweed Park?" reads the Kickstarter pitch. "Because we miss classic adventures and all their innocence and charm. They were fun and would put a smile on your face. We want to make one of those again and we want to do it right. We don’t want to make a game “inspired by,” or “paying homage to” classic point & click adventures, we want to make a real classic point & click adventure. Thimbleweed Park is a game for true lovers of adventure games. This is a Kickstarter for fans who loved Maniac Mansion, Monkey Island, and everything else that made that era great. It strips away all the cruft built up over the years and is distilled down to what we loved about the genre."

If funded, Thimbleweed Park's aiming for a release in June 2016 on PC, Mac, and Linux.

Ehh... I'd be wary as The Cave wasn't that good...

There were good ideas but implemented very poorly. They tried to give it a lot of replay value by having 2 endings for each of the 7 characters but forgot it was a puzzle game. Having a team of 3 for each playthrough, you'll have to finish the game 5 times and more than half of it being repeating the same puzzles. I played the PS3 version which was also very buggy. I reached a point where i couldn't jump out of a pit so waited for an update to fix that. When the update hit (weeks after i played it), it deleted my save which is when i deleted the game.

I can already hear the Kickstarter cynicism train pulling into the station.

Wow already at $71,000. This will get funded in no time. Looking forward to it.

I feel sad for Gilbert. He's had poor luck with games the last thirty years. To say nothing of The Cave.

I don't think making an 80s adventure game is going to help.

Maybe I'm just not interested in point and click adventure games any longer, but with the art style this seems like a lot of money, and a lot of development time.

I'll throw in a 20 burger, just for my love of Maniac Mansion really

Development costs are more than just the art style.

I'm kinda with you. All my Gilbert goodwill was spent on The Cave. It wasn't a bad game, it just wasn't really good. I hope this makes it, but I'll wait for reviews before plunking down my money and more importantly, my time on this one. I do like the idea of building an old school ass old school game tho.

Oh what the hell.

I thought The Cave was great, apart from the heavily repeated middle segments when you did several runs. But I don't know about playing another game with an interface like the one in the screenshot. Nostalgia is great and all but we know how to make something more usable now. :)

These games nowadays really hinge on the humor. And after The Cave and Deathspank, I'm just not totally confident in that huge aspect of it being great.

Maybe a return to the old style will bring a return to the sharp and hilarious writing with it.

I hope!

I hope this gets kickstarted and he makes something remarkable. I won't be backing it, but I sincerely do hope he puts The Cave behind him.

Verb systems might be old school and retro, but it's just not the best interface.

Open and Close are basically two sides of the same coin and could be combined.

Same for Push and Pull.Even Use , Give and Pick up are pretty much the same thing.

But hey, if the game is fun, i'll push all those buttons to see what happens.

Careful Ron, your buddy Tim tried that not long ago and… things got a bit weird.

Ooooooooooooh! I forgot about Deathspank, that game made me sad inside

After Deathspank and The Cave, Gilbert won't be getting my money in advance.

I love pixel art and I love adventure games, but Ron Gilbert...I'm just not sure I can care after The Cave...

Don't know if I'll back this since I haven't been into Gilbert's recent stuff and I'm sure it will make it without me but that screenshot is...arousing. Really hope this is great.

Classic adventure games have been done, and done well. New and interesting takes on adventure games are what interests me!

Good luck to Gilbert, but I'd really like to see the Adventure genre escape from the pixel nostalgia and actually try to do something else.

Well I'm interested. Maybe because I didn't touch The Cave.

I hope this actually runs in ScummVM. That would open it up to even more platforms.

Uhm, it did? A long time ago actually.

It's somehow both disheartening and reassuring to see so many people share my profound disappointment with Ron Gilbert.

Best of luck to him, though. I hope he proves all of us wrong by making an awesome and wildly profitable game.

It's about time somebody makes a classic point and click Adventure already. I'm pretty sold!

I know it did, but why is he going back to the same exact visual style as his old games?

Cause people like this visual style.

Looking back at Ron's history, he really hasn't done much else other than a bunch of great adventure game work in the late '80s/early '90s and then Deadspank and The Cave in the latter half of the 2000s. It adds some corroborating evidence to my feeling that Ron Gilbert disappeared for a while, came back so to speak and has been hit or miss since. To be fair he's only had those two projects to his name since he's come back into development so I wouldn't count out the old man yet.

It's kind of interesting that for all intents and purposes this is exactly what Broken Age could have been, a smaller budget throwback that follows the old SCUMM style to the letter. I don't think it would have been that anyway if it hadn't been overfunded like it did but still.

I never played Maniac Mansion (stop throwing tomatoes at me!) but the visual style here is pretty great. I don't think there are any pixel adventure games that look exactly like this, the Wadjet Eye games look different and their own style.

Double Fine lead the charge with Kickstarter and then let everybody down with their awful finances. Makes you wonder if Bobby Kotick was right on the money when he called Schafer lazy and poor at management. (around the time of the Brutal Legend publisher fiasco)

Hmm. I didn't particularly like The Cave and this looks like a real throwback to the 80s. Adventure games have evolved since to be much more user-friendly than that SCUMM UI in the screenshot. I don't know. I'm not kickstarting this, but I guess we'll see how it turns out in about 2-3 years.

I'm in!

Ron Gilbert hasn't made a good game since The Secret of Monkey Island, I'm not sure why he's still so well-regarded. The Gearbox Paradox rears its head again,

I'll gladly buy the game when it's released. I won't be funding it, though. Good luck, Ron!

Just woken up and reading the news, I thought for a moment it said Wilbert Gotfried and confused for a moment.

Looks like this will get funded but man I couldn't be more skeptical and less interested in another adventure game attempt by Gilbert.

Good luck to him though.

So uhh... what has Ron Gilbert made recently that people are willing to give him money for? Because Deathspank and The Cave didn't exactly set the world on fire. And no, Putt Putt doesn't count as recent.

Think about the hamster for pet's sake!!

Backed! When is 2016 now, hope it's next week...

Neat, Maniac Mansion was great, but I think I'll wait for the reviews on this one.

You know .. you really don't have to replay it .

@giant_gamer: Then itll be just a 2-3 hour mediocre game. Platforming was okay and the puzzles were pretty easy to solve. I'd have to replay cause i wanted to see the other puzzles.

In. Supporter of Ron, even if I didn't love the Cave. Getting back to his roots, feels like an old band getting together for one last album.

@forteexe21: i don't think that it's a 2-3 hour game unless you know what to do and you are speedrunning. Overall the game is good, fun to play and provide a great amount of content to replay it.

For its asking price, i think it delivered more than enough.

Uh Ron Gibert.. 'The Gamey Game of Gameness', part of some great games in 90s, but I've had my fill.

Kickstarter's had enough big-name strange cases by now that folks seem (appropriately) more cautious about new projects.

I don't have much nostalgia for pixel-art adventure games, but I do like me some pixel-art all the same. Good luck to them I guess. Not just with the Kickstarter, but actually, you know, finishing and putting out the game.

I asked that dog about LOOM but he wouldn't give me the key to the cell door.

Sure, but we didn't know that going in. There were 7 or 8 different characters from which you could only pick 3, and we knew they'd have some personalized areas. That heavily implied that we were supposed to play through multiple times. It would've been better received if they had said from the get-go: This is a one playthrough game at about the length of Journey, pick the people you think look cool. Fire and forget. At that point, its only weakness would have been the stiff and slow traversal. There wasn't really anything wrong with the writing or presentation.

I suppose Journey is a bad example because it offered a lot on the second play through. Uncover more of the world, help other players and upgrade your robe. You get the idea though.