Today we’re talking about another game from the “developers apparently hate their players” category. It joins the list of already discussed point & click adventures that are based on the “classics”, such as “Beyond the Edge of Owlsgard” and “Justin Wack and The Big Time Hack” – because of several reasons. Unfortunately, I was also very disappointed in “Thimbleweed Park”. You can read why exactly here. Contains spoilers!

I don’t think I need to get into most of the points – if you don’t have any background information, please read the articles on Owlsgard or Justin Wack. This is just going to be a little rant about what I think went wrong. Let’s keep it short: technically the game went well. No bugs, no crashes, works fine. So, those were all the good points.

The story begins very promisingly: we first play as the victim of the case that we are supposed to solve later. He wants to meet an informant under a bridge, right by a river. A short time later he is dead – and that’s where the actual protagonists come into play.

The main task in the game is solving the murder of the aforementioned man. It’s the task of two FBI agents, whose names and backgrounds I already stopped to care about while playing. You can switch back and forth between the two, they can give each other stuff, we know the drill. Over time, more and more playable characters are added, there are five in total. Each of them has a list of tasks that we have to work through – sometimes the order is arbitrary, sometimes so complex that we quickly don’t know what to do next – in my opinion it’s not done very well. The fact that sometimes necessary steps simply don’t appear in the to-do list is great as well; you learn to rely on the list a lot in the first two acts, only to be left hanging in the air afterwards. Peak game design.

While the tasks of the two FBI agents are mostly quite the same (in the first three acts at least, I didn’t play any further) and only differ slightly when they do, the inventories are clearly separated from each other. This is particularly brilliant when one of the two is kidnapped and can no longer be played for about ten minutes (this happens randomly for the “tension”), because you can no longer access their inventory. It happened to us a total of two times during two kidnappings that we simply couldn’t continue until the game decided to give us the person back – great, it’s fun to wait pointlessly.

During the first rescue, we were left with something unclear: apparently senseless actions. The first time you are freed, it is necessary for the other character to drop a coin into a drain – but of course they don’t know why. But that’s not a problem at all, they do it anyway. In other places, however, the characters simply refuse to carry out actions if they have no discernible meaning – overall it seems quite random and only suitable for the purpose of the story when the characters know about each other’s goals or not, and therefore wether to carry obviously nonsensical out actions. That’s great because at some point you just try things out and no longer look at what is logical and what isn’t – the game doesn’t seem to care either.

But this was taken to the extreme with one object in particular, namely the chainsaw. If you try to pick it up from a bush, you will be immediately told that this would be a mistake and the character will refuse to take it. This happened repeatedly because I was convinced that the saw was needed after all – but in the end I dismissed it as a homage to Zak McKraken.

Plot twist: at some point, completely unknown to me, the saw is unlocked and you can take it. Sure, you don’t even try after several attempts, but that’s not the game’s fault. This part made me so excited that I only wish the developers warm sides on their pillows for the rest of their lives.

But joking aside, this pattern unfortunately runs very strongly throughout the game. Elsewhere, a postal worker talks to us at length about our FBI activities, but then doesn’t give us any scotch tape because that’s only for government officials. Obviously, right? But we still have other points ahead of us.

One option in the game was to reduce references to classic games and pop culture. My hope was that with this option the really long and rambling dialogues about nonsense would be reduced a bit – wrong thought, it was really about objects in the game. On the one hand, this meant that you could still take collectibles with you, but they had no purpose at all, and this option meant that it was no longer obvious that they were actually an Easter egg. Or it led to the disappearance of objects – but this was so prominent that one could consider it to be a clue in the case that one was supposed to solve. An example of this is the missing poster from the police station, which leaves an obvious and suspicious gap – but has nothing to do with the case at all.

All of these points, and many more, really annoyed me about this game – but there is one thing that really bothers me. Right at the beginning of the game you meet two plumbers in pigeon suits (meant to be funny, it wasn’t my taste of humor). In a “funny” fourth wall break, they explain to you at length that games have evolved since back in the day and that there are now many convenience functions so that the player no longer gets upset about unnecessary steps or problems.

At the same time, the only effective convenience function is automatic saving – the developers have actually made the rest even worse, especially through mechanics such as the disappearance of characters or the absolutely opaque order in which actions have to be carried out. I didn’t think I’d say this before playing, but it was the worst point and click adventure I’ve played in the last year – maybe even in the last 5-10 years.

I ended up abandoning the game because I don’t like to waste my time for such a steaming pile of misfortune – I wouldn’t recommend anyone to play this game. I don’t understand many of the decisions made and see absolutely no logic in many of the puzzles and most of the characters’ actions – whether dictated by the game or carried out by us. I have no explanation but the hatred of the devolpers against their players to justify the decisions made leading to this final product – or they just didn’t know better, I have no idea.

What do you think? Can you understand my anger about this game, did you actually like it or are you even a fan? Feel free to join the discussion on Discord!