I may have made a slight tactical error with Thimbleweed Park. I've been playing it on the PS4, despite it clearly being a mouse-driven point-and-click game, and it was a mere month later (this month, in fact) that the game was released for free on the Epic Game Store. Whoops. All the same, I've been looking forward to getting into Ron Gilbert's latest attempt to recapture his past glory (man, that's a harsh way of putting it, sorry Ron) ever since it was released back in 2017. Very much in the spirit of his Maniac Mansion - the characters all have the similarly enlarged crania, and the old SCUMM "wall o' verbs" is out of mothballs - Thimbleweed Park is a murder mystery story set in a strange remote town with more than an speck of Twin Peaks and The X-Files put into its design and that of the characters, especially the ostensible protagonists of sceptical redhead Agent Ray and over-enthusiastic "Agent" Reyes of the FBI. There's also a few others that are introduced in flashback first and then incorporated in the player's rolodex of playable characters, selectable from a drop-down menu (and, in the PS4 version at least, can be cycled through by hitting either of the triggers).

The game pulls a Yooka-Laylee in delivering a much older style of game, warts and all, to an expectant audience of Kickstarter backers. Specifically in Thimbleweed's case, those who grew up on the classic LucasArts (when they were still LucasFilm) adventure games from the late-1980s and 1990s. Steps have been made to mitigate frustration with this older style of game, not least of which is how every character keeps a "to-do" list of current objectives and that there's an in-game hint system that's un-intrusive enough to stay out of sight if you're a diehard "hit head against wall" type of adventure gamer like myself. In fact, it's mostly because of that obstinacy that I've yet to make much of a dent after two days of lead-in. I have, however, met all the characters and progressed a decent amount into the mystery, so I feel like I've at least seen enough to pass judgement.

Suffice it to say, then, that the game doesn't intend to take it too easy on you, introducing many areas to explore early on (though the flashbacks are much more contained) and a few open-ended goals to pursue that might require several links in a chain of puzzle solutions. From his Twitter and past interviews, Ron Gilbert strikes me as the kind of individual who might offer to DM a game of Dungeons & Dragons with enough cajoling, but you better like playing his lethally diabolical custom campaign with the First Edition ruleset. Granted, that is what the people buying this game want, myself included, and I'm thankful the few references the game makes to Maniac Mansion tropes - hamster in the microwave, using the phone a lot, getting caught and trapped in a place you can only be bailed out from by another protagonist, or having multiple protagonists with different areas of expertise in the first place - are simply references rather than the occasionally game-breaking (in the "dead man walking" sense of making the game uncompletable) puzzles they once were.

It would be prudent to say that this game was built for and by fans of adventure games of a very specific era. The amusing script and tricky puzzles should be appealing enough to a wider audience, but the game goes out of its way to play to its chosen crowd of Gen-X point-and-click nerds with wall-to-wall references of games from that period and its nostalgic 1987 setting (which was when Maniac Mansion was first released, not coincidentally). I could do without some of the less appealing obsolete aspects of that era, like having maze areas full of contiguous empty screens that serve no purpose other to keep you disoriented, or the way you spend most of the early game running around instead of having a fast travel system (which is eventually and mercifully introduced). The game seems aware of its more antiquated elements at least, poking fun at itself with an optional collectible side-quest where you literally go pixel hunting for errant specks of dust on the ground, but I could really take or leave that degree of stringent fidelity to the 30-year-old-plus games it venerates.

In spite of those misgivings, I can definitely say that I've enjoyed my time with Thimbleweed Park so far - albeit as a member of its intended audience - and plan to keep pushing my way to its end throughout the weekend if I can stop being a tuna head long enough to figure out what to do next.

Rating: 4 out of 5.