Thimbleweed Park on the Nintendo Switch is an excellent throwback to the adventure games of old. What’s even better is developers, Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick have driven a beast like this before. Their previous work on Maniac Mansion and The Secret of Monkey Island already sets the bar fairly high for the spiritual successor, Thimbleweed Park.
The game starts off with a simple tutorial like area, where you’re guiding a man named Boris to a meeting down by the river. Here you’ll be introduced to how the game works which, if you’ve played either of the above-mentioned games you’ll know exactly what you’re doing.
Thimbleweed Park’s screen is made up of three areas. The largest portion is the game world, this is where you can move your character around, interact with items, talk with other people, and solve any of the puzzles you’ll encounter. Beneath this are the two smaller but equally important areas of the screen. On the left side is your action box, where a bunch of actions reside, while the right side houses your inventory.
Once you’re through the tutorial, the game will open wide up for you. There’s now a dead body in the river, and two detectives standing over it, studying for clues. Detective’s Ray and Reyes have been brought to the small town to discover whose body it is and who’s responsible for making it dead. Their only problem is some of the inhabitants of Thimbleweed Park seem to not want them around.
In addition to the two detectives, players can also control an additional three characters, whom you’ll meet over the course of the game. Once you get into the main portion of the game you’re able to explore the town in it’s almost-entirety at your own pace, so there’s no for-sure amount of time before you meet these characters. What’s more, you can switch between the characters any time you want, provided you’re in the right timeline since some areas will be a flashback and you’ll only have access to the respective character for that section.
Thimbleweed Park’s humor accompanies you on your entire adventure, and boy is it good. The first thing you’ll want to do is go through the game’s options and make sure the “Toilet Humor” and “In Joke” options are turned on. Once they are, you’ll spend as much time looking for people to talk to as you will solving puzzles. Every conversation gives you multiple options for your characters to speak, from contextual questions for the investigation to personal questions aimed at the person you’re speaking to.
In the end, Thimbleweed Park is both a great and challenging game. The puzzles can seem quite difficult, but the game helps you in many ways including an actual “Hint Line” you can call on the in-game payphones. While it’s available on multiple platforms, I personally enjoyed this very much on the Switch as it fully supports the use of the console’s touchscreen which can speed things up immensely. With the exception of the PC version, having to control the game’s cursor to interact with everything can feel a bit repetitive and tedious. This in no way takes away from how incredible this game is overall.
