Thimbleweed Park's pitch is simple: Monkey Island and Maniac Mansion creator Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick are making an oldschool point-and-click adventure that looks, sounds and plays like a Lucasarts title from the late 80s. You look at Thimbleweed Park once, think "yeah, I get what they're going for", and move on. But having played nearly a half hour of it at PAX East, it becomes apparent that by staying true to its quarter century old roots, Gilbert, Winnick, and co. have created something that feels genuinely fresh in today's landscape.
There's a few different ways Thimbleweed Park captures this lost art of the classic point-and-click adventure. My favourite is how it handles dialogue. Rather than have players scroll through a cyclical dialogue tree until they've heard all the witty banter, Thimbleweed Park stays true to the original Monkey Island where most conversations only let you pick one response before the natter flows forward in one direction. This means that players inherently miss a lion's share of the gags, but it certainly punches up the pacing.
When asked if it bothered him to spend so much time on jokes most players won't see, Gilbert tells me "No. Not at all. Because you can come back to it later, maybe on a second playthrough. In Monkey Island a lot of the dialogues people never went down and discovered and that's fine! I think it gives the game depth."
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