Game EXP: Thimbleweed Park (NS)

It has now been a number of months since I finished Thimbleweed Park, and even far longer since I first started.  And I had nearly written off the need/feel/obligation to write an article about Thimbleweed Park, that was until Dr. Potts made the comment on my article about Earthworms last month about developers design solutions to help people from walking in circles and trying to combine all of the items in their inventory.  That is when I came back to Thimbleweed Park, which has this very feature in the most ingenious way possible.

From what I understand, Thimbleweed Park has two difficulty settings, Casual and Hard. In later updates, Casual would give you the option of playing with hints, which is the option I took (especially since it was my first foray into adventure point-and-click games in some decades.  Or at least I felt like it was.  I have no shame in needing guidance if I feel like I am stuck, but I would much rather use an in-game hint system that use someone else's walkthrough (but I will use a walkthrough if necessary).  To my surprise and glee, Thimbleweed Park, at least the Easy mode, did come with an integrated help system.

I don't recall if I found out what H.I.N.T. stood for. Or I just forgot.

Whenever you find yourself lost in the game, you are able to pick up a phone and call a number.  How do you know that you can do this?  Because there are flyers throughout town with little pull-tabs advertising the in-game help system with a four digit number that you can call.  Upon calling the HintTron 3000™, you are given a series of questions to click that will lead you in the right direction, often involving a number of questions to give you as much of a hint as you need before telling you, pretty precisely what you need to do in order to solve that leg of the puzzle.  Sometimes characters will even tell you that that weird looking item that has been sitting in your inventory will not come into use until the literal end of the game.

Thimbleweed Park never took itself too seriously, often breaking the fourth wall with any one of the characters referring to point-and-click adventure games, or even commenting on the make-up and design of the screens/maps.  If definitely made having an in-game hotline to call for when you needed assistance.  That being said, there were a few instances when I resorted to YouTube because either the clue was too vague, even after being blatantly told something like, "You have to reach the paper in order to grab it."  Sometimes I would click through the hints reading them, feeling like I understood them until I tried to execute my dastardly schemes, only to find out that what I thought was not possible, and by that point, you are unable to go back and listen to previous hints.

So many items. But at least I have the chainsaw in the graveyard. Just in case.

There were also times when my brain would make puzzles a lot more complicated than they were supposed to be.  In one puzzle, you have to acquire some blood, but all of the objects I already had in my inventory would not work.  I tried various pieces of paper, a finger print kit, and even a can of Poopsi that I thought I could drink, then fill the can up with blood.  As it turned out, I had to access a room I did not even know existed as I thought it was part of the un-interact-able background, and take a piece of toilet paper.  This was after being told by one of the FBI agents that my suggestion for a device to pick up the blood was not sanitary enough or that it would contaminate the blood sample.  But Kwik-E-Mart around the side of the building bathroom-level toilet paper is fine?

I definitely used the HintTron 3000™ a lot more in the last couple of chapters.  As the playable area opened up and the number of items each of the five characters was carrying seemed to be ever increasing, the possible uses, combination of items and places where these could be used seemed to be growing at a rate that far outpaced by brains ability to comprehend it all.  Maybe that makes me a bad person, or at the very least, a bad gamer.  But I will tell you what!  I really enjoyed the story that was told as I felt like it was a mash up of The X-Files and Twin Peaks all set in the ripe year of 1987, and asking for help in a game/setting that I really enjoy is not going to deter me from having another crack at another point-and-click adventure game.

Now to figure out Earthworms. . .



~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
Instrumental