For players with a few more years on their backs, the name of Ron Gilbert is able to unleash a whirlwind of nostalgic memories. If we have already said at the time of the review of The Cave and we are going to repeat it today is because the “Grumpy Gamer” (the name he gave to his blog) is one of the reference people behind some of the greatest masterpieces that between the 80s and 90s contributed to the success of graphic adventures.
A genre now for a while ‘at sunset, after which the same Gilbert has managed to find the outlets of the past for his humor and creativity only sporadically, making itself known in recent years in projects such as DeathSpank and the aforementioned The Cave. Games that are more than good, but different from Gilbert’s historical genre and far from that spark of immortality that titles like Maniac Mansion,
Monkey Island and many others were able to trigger in the hearts of gamers of their era. A love never wilted, as demonstrated by the millions that Tim Schafer has collected with Broken Age , relying on Kickstarter to succeed in the task of publishing a graphic adventure after so long.
Ron Gilbert himself did it some time ago, collecting over $ 600,000 with the promise to take us all to Thimbleweed Park , a graphic adventure with an old style and no discounts. Finally today we can find out if he really succeeded.
Thimbleweed Park takes us back to twenty and a few years ago, until the golden age of graphic adventures
MURDERS AND CUSHIONS
The story of Thimbleweed Park starts with a murder on the doorstep of the city, where Angela Rey and Antonio Reyes, a pair of FBI agents who seem to have come straight out of X-Files, begin to investigate.
She is an expert and cynical, young and ambitious, to compose a duo that to shed light on the criminal event will inevitably have to deal with the eccentric local population: we will not be at the levels of memorability touched with Stan, Herman Toothrot other characters of the past, but having to deal with the local “sheriff-a-rino” and its multiple identities will not go unnoticed.In a similar way, on more than one occasion a joke will come to tear a smile from you.
But back to the plot: we are in 1987 and Thimbleweed Park is a small town, typical of the American hinterland, where most of the eighty inhabitants grew up in adoration of the old Chuck,
owner of a pillow factory with a glorious past that disappeared due to natural causes few days. Delores, his nephew, is a videogame programmer who has returned to the city for mourning, forced in spite of herself to deal with the rest of the heirs to share Chuck’s fortunes. All this while his father Franklin, Chuck’s brother with whom he came into conflict because of his intentions to transform the factory, has disappeared from sight.
From the initial murder to Ransome’s crime, the various plot parts seem to us at first to be unrelated to each other, but Rey and Reyes will not take long to realize that the plot touches all the characters in Thimbleweed Park.
It is no coincidence that the story is told to us also through some of the protagonists we mentioned above, making us see for example the moment when Delores gets his job as a developer disappointing his uncle who wanted to see him at the head of the factory cushions, or the one in which Ransome is cursed by
the old woman with whom we will then have the opportunity to go back to dealing with the course of history. Our list lacks the last of the controllable characters, on which we will not say anything because we believe that its identity is one of the surprises found within Thimbleweed Park. For the rest, we leave you the pleasure to discover all that is hidden in the eyes of the two agents, leaving you glued to the chair and eager to move forward.
