And that’s how it feels, magic, when you crack one of this game’s many puzzles, bound as they are by a skewed but consistent sense of logic. You use verbs – “give”, “talk”, “open” – in association with characters and collectibles, and lo: the magic happens. How it plays is entirely in keeping with Winnick and Gilbert’s point-and-click past, the likes of Maniac Mansion and The Secret of Monkey Island. The “villain” of the piece, for example, shares a name with a certain spectral pirate captain and a library-hanging pot plant, which is surely no coincidence. So far as contemporary gaming yarns go, this is one of the year’s best, full of winks to the camera and plentiful Easter eggs. Which is tough, truly, because so much of the pleasure to be found in the 1987-set Thimbleweed Park – the year of Michael Jackson’s Bad, The Lost Boys in cinemas, and the start of Star Trek: The Next Generation on TV (the game features a chuckle-worthy nod to the latter) – is through the unfolding of its didn’t-see-that-coming sci-fi plot. Yes, everything’s purposefully flat, but once the wider county beyond the town of Thimbleweed Park is unlocked – you’re going to need some loose change for that – this is a world that’s open and alive, believable despite visual limitations, even while displaying a distinct lack of certain individuals and amenities. The game’s relaxed movement through the narrative gears is a good thing, because Thimbleweed Park is in its element when the player doesn’t feel a great urgency to get things done, instead luxuriating in the finely realised, not-quite-8-bit-rendered world that the team at Terrible Toybox, headed up by LucasArts legends Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick (who are co-designers here), have constructed. And its keenness to let the player know it’s both a video game and part of a very specific lineage of them, where fourth-wall breaking is often part of the package, is always endearing. Soon enough, though, factoring in the silliness and highly self-referential nature of proceedings, the game’s tone becomes more Eerie, Indiana than anything where the stakes are rather more raised, its gentle drama underpinned by sharp funnies. It feels spooked, not quite of this plane of existence, long before you get to play as an Actual Ghost. The game initially manifests a kind of Twin Peaks-meets- The X-Files aesthetic and atmosphere.
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