As a player who drifted further and further away from games as a narrative form as one purported masterpiece after another was a rank disappointment, this is the most faith I've had in the possibilities of the medium since Grim Fandango, and a lot of that comes down to how Thimbleweed Park exploited everything that SCUMM format can do at its best in using the basic elements of dialogue trees and item-matching puzzles as techniques for character development, irony, and suspense. I've played many of Ron Gilbert's games (the Humongous games, DeathSpank, The Cave, etc.) and this is easily his best since he was at LucasArts. Delores' ending was also easy to reach without consulting the Kickstarter video, which I appreciated: in the context of the ending it makes sense to have an interaction that makes no intrinsic sense without reference to the external world outside the game, but I still found it important for this to be playable on its own terms, and it was.Īnyway, I adored this game, and I could gush about the particulars all day. I got Ransome's bad ending, playing him as incorrigibly rude and unable to change his ways, and really appreciated that I was given the choice of doing so given that we had just been told by the story that nobody in this contrived game world has any choice. This has tapped into something fierce, and I hope it lasts all the way. The multi-character setup and the rising anticipation of how the plethora of key items will be exchanged definitely make DotT seem like the closest cousin. I've played so many games by the major LucasArts alumni (Ron Gilbert included) in recent years, hoping something would scratch the itch, and now we have a game that absolutely nails what the SCUMM adventures were all about and also pushes the narrative possibilities of the format in new directions. I'll say more when I'm finished, as I'm clearly still in the honeymoon period, but so far this game has been for me what Sonic Mania was to the Genesis-era Sonic die-hards. (So far I've experimented with a number of different setups to get this the way I want, and the closest I can get is to put my Joy-Cons in a controller grip, put the controller by my side, and reach for the buttons with my right hand as needed. I find that I like to cradle the Switch in my left hand while using touch controls and the occasional button on my right, but I'd have an even better time of this if I had D-pad navigation (not the sluggish R-stick) on my right hand rather than my left, for absolute precision while selecting dialogue without having to adjust my grip on the unit. My only complaint is that as someone who prefers a combination of touch and buttons on the Switch (I'm using buttons for character switching, dialogue trees, and slowly panning over the humongous number of unique book titles on the shelves, and touch for everything else), I wish we had some minor degree of interface customization like swapping the D-pad navigation over to the face buttons on the right side. This is on Hard with "Annoying in-jokes" ticked, though I don't know if the latter refers to the considerable volume of one-off LucasArts throwbacks or something even more obscure. Delores' segment in the mansion) I am in love.
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