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I played it when it was released and mostly enjoyed it, though I can't remember what difficulty setting I picked. I bought it mostly because I like Mark Ferrari's art, but ended up completing it. Some characters and jokes were intensely annoying, especially Ransome. I did like Delores, though.

Afterwards, I revisited some LucasArts games I'd played before (Monkey Island 1 and 2), and tried my hand with some I hadn't (Fate of Atlantis, Sam'n'Max, Full Throttle and also Flight of the Amazon Queen, which isn't from LucasArts). I think what you describe is actually fairly representative of the overall LucasArts experience. Character building is limited, even the funny jokes get tiresome after you've clicked through them a fifth time, some puzzles are illogical even for games with a sillier tone (monkey wrench, anyone?), and there's often a lot of walking about, repeating conversations, and clicking randomly just to see what happens. Some of them (Thimbleweed Park, MI2) also have exceptionally poor endings.

Out of the games I played, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis was the best, though I got stuck (by forgetting some object in a room outside a complex labyrinth) close to the end and didn't bother completing it. The main character is pre-established, the plot feels like an Indy movie, and I can't recall any genuinely preposterous puzzle solutions (though it was a few years ago now).

I love the Monkey Island games, they're a part of my childhood. But I mostly love them for the music and graphics, not necessarily for the puzzles or the many gags that other people always seem to find a lot funnier than I do.

It's an point and click adventure made by a renowned point and click designer for point and click adventure enthusiasts. Some moon logic is to be expected - I didn't find it to be particularly bad in this game. I think its OK to have games that are targeted at veterans of a certain genre.

The 4th wall breaking was lame though, especially the ending.

> there's no logic to solving them so you'd have to resort to clicking everything and with 5 playable characters

Are multiple/simultaneous playable characters a common feature of adventure game design from LucasArts alum? I played Broken Age and thought the idea was novel, but recently played through Day of the Tentacle for the first time and thought the mechanic made things too complicated. So many people say that adventure games are nostalgic, but the ones I played growing up were Kings Quest 6 and Myst (games with only one playable character). These other multiple character adventure games are nowhere near enjoyable for me.

I gave up half way through. There was a lack of direction (for me) and too many permutations of clicks, characters, items and locations. The humour was ok, the story I was willing to give a chance. But I didn't want to resort to a walk through so I just kind of petered out.

> Only about 20% of the jokes land for me

I found the game so intensely unfunny (and there are few things I am selfishly rooting more for in life than another great point and click adventure)

I agree Thimbleweed Park was a little rough, a bit like Maniac Mansion if you like. What gives me hope is that Monkey Island 5 was really really good, so I feel he's back in his grove.

Agreed. I don’t mind having to use a hint book or look things up on GameFAQs, but if, even after that, the solution to a puzzle still makes me go, “How the hell would I ever have figured that out?”, then that’s profoundly unsatisfying for me.

This is my biggest problem with adventure games in general, and I'm a huge King's Quest fan, but sometimes the number of cryptic "What you didn't realize you needed to kneel in front of a cliff with a red crystal to summon the tornado Uber? so obvious" stuff definitely can put off newcomers from the genre.

Looking back I do wonder if Monkey Island etc would appeal to me at all fresh, only one I think would still land is maybe Loom but I think the jokes in it would be the worst part.

These games definitely felt magical as a kid but I think the feeling of it being this whole rich interactive little world full of characters carried a lot of weak jokes and writing.

I found the puzzles fair enough, but my impressions about writing and characters match yours.

Difficulty is on par with 90's adventure games (and actually easier than Sierra games).

Story: Without any spoilers, I'll just say the ending isn't satisfying in the least. He does the equivalent of "I woke up and it was all a dream."

Broken sword is definitely a different style of game. I stopped playing broken sword when I had to solve a 15 puzzle to enter a sewer.

One recent game I really liked was VirtuaVerse. Not incredibly hard, really good music and art design. It really felt like it took the lucasarts game style into the next century.

Did you like the King's Quest games?

I wonder did you enjoy the Monkey Island games. I really loved Delores and Ransome particularly in TWP.

Meh to each their own - I haven't played it for a while but I quite like TP's style/music/atmosphere, and the surrealness/metaness was a feature not a bug for me. I played SoMI2 with my friends telling me that the ending was super weird, so I didn't feel completely cheated when I got to that one and I think TP's ending is very Ron Gilbert.

Agree that some moon logic is present/inevitable but I think the Gilbert games are friendlier than most in this respect.

Worse than the Babel fish dispenser?

I didn't play on hard, but that wasn't my experience with the puzzles. I thought they were all pretty good. I didn't use a guide at all.

It's been a while, but I think I pretty much agree about the writing and story. I pretty much don't even remember it.

I'm guessing, given they're relying on private financing, the ability to reuse assets from TP1 is the major reason to make it a sequel instead of a new IP.

Personally I liked TP1 a lot for the most part, but I agree that the ending was a horrible misstep. I'm not adverse to metafiction, and this is Gilbert after all, that's kind of his jam, but the sheer nihilism of it all left a horrible taste in the mouth. Ironically, for someone who cares so deeply about game design, it felt like an ending entirely borne of Gilbert and his fellow designers pleasing themselves, instead of thinking about how it would feel for the player.

That said, I'm still glad there's going to be a sequel. Hopefully it has more of what I liked and less of what I didn't.

Yes, the ending was kind of lame. Worse, it has been done before, again by Ron Gilbert. It is practically a rehash of the Monkey Island 2 ending, which got us nowhere in the long run.

If you feel like trying a hail Mary to perhaps improve the ending I have two theories that I couldn't muster enough strength to check. Also, spoilers from here on.

First, there's a fridge that you can't open close to the ending of the game and that I understand as containing the body of the ghost character. I imagine there must be a way to open it, if only to give him closure.

Second, and related: given that the ending shows you a Basic prompt I imagine there has to be a way to use it for something other than restarting the game. I believe there was (for instance) a part of the game about getting a videotape but, once you had the right equipment, was no longer available to get. Perhaps those parts of the game can be unlocked if you know how to use the console to set the proper variables.

I've long hoped that we've all been getting the bad ending while there's a second one hidden somewhere (which has been hinted at [1]), but since I was fairly down after the ending I got I couldn't muster the energy to replay it all again.

> Thimbleweed Park 1 has possibly the worst ending of a game, ever.

I see that someone hasn't played the latest Monkey Island.

[1] https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/maniac_the_cave_thimbleweed...

If you every played the first two Monkey Island games, and understand the lore behind that, then the ending is pretty good. Thimbleweed park, in many way, was a spiritual successor to Monkey Island 2 that Gilbert couldn't make for IP reasons back in the day. With at in mind, I enjoyed the ending. That said, Monkey Island 2 got a lot of criticism for its ending too...

I found Thimbleweed Park 1 very difficult. The puzzles were too hard. I didn't complete it. I tried to play it with my girlfriend, I thought it would be a nice game to work together to play/solve. It stumped both of us. No fun.

Steam has a CLI that installs games. I’ve been meaning to use it to install each of my games and archive their installation for future offline use.

That’s not as convenient as an easy-to-download offline installer, certainly, but seems workable in theory. Maybe I’m unaware of limitation(s) to this approach?

https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/SteamCMD

Yeah, I loved it, too. Not quite on the level of the first two Monkey Island games, but still a great experience. One of the few games I actually finished in the last bunch of years.

I think the time between the original and this will work out well for me to be excited to play a sequel.

That link was amazing.

I felt that Return to Monkey Island was a bit of a cop-out.

But the multi-layer, Mulholland Drive-esq, storytelling is a real eye-opener.

It appears that his multi-layered storytelling found its way into Thimbleweed Park and surface-level understanding probably won't get you far.

I think you’re underrating the sheer amount of iteration that occurs. SaaS has requirements and then implementation- it’s a product that has a target it hits. Yes, churn happens, but the point is you’re working to a specific goal.

Games and any creative work isn’t like that. There’s constant iteration as new ideas come up or developers learn in play testing that certain parts of the game work better than others, and so they realign things continually and keep refining. I’m not a game dev btw, but blogs from devs show a continual cycle of refinement and feature creep.

It's just a lot of work.

You need to build the engine/tech, need to support various platforms including building a rendering pipeline (so Vulkan, DirectX and Metal). You need to support animation (probably just 2D?), audio (including various effects and params), different types of input, a UI system, etc. To author the assets you need editors of some form for building the scenes, for cinematics, for the narrative, for the animations, a lot of these will be custom. Then to get the assets in the game you need a pipeline that coverts everything into platform specific formats. And all of this has to be performant, targeting 60fps ideally and cross platform.

That's just the tech side. Then you need all the other disciplines to be in sync. Can't start on animations until you have characters, can't start on those until you have concepts but can't have those until you have a narrative. And these will go via a lot of iterations as you try things out and figure out what works.

Then there's testing, the possibilities from a user perspective are really broad so the bug surface is massive. For a simple app the user is quite limited so it's simpler to enforce rules and unit tests. With a game a user can do a lot across many platforms and the issues can be on the low level graphics driver or just logic puzzle errors.

Then you have certification, platform holders have a book of tests they do to your game so you don't brick the console. Things like, does you game handle unplugging the console while you're saving to disk?

I can imagine they'll reuse a ton of tech from previous games, but there's always new things you need to do. Two years is actually pretty fast for the industry.

The best answer to that question is the development blog they made for the first game:

https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/archives.html

At a quick glance: four months for the engine (which they wrote from scratch [1]) and, based on the budget [2], roughly nine months for crowdsourcing and pre-production (setting the overall story and puzzles, deciding on the look of the game, building small proofs-of-concept), seven months for production, three months for testing and bugfixing, and two months for release (which they overshot by three months).

[1] https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/roadmap1.html

[2] https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/budget1.html

In my experience, business software has narrow and predictable use cases. Note taking: You need to add, delete and update notes and the real meat of the product is usually in the note organization. Even SAP has use cases simple in nature: Account for milk cartons sold. The use cases just grow complex once you work in 30 countries or more. "Pay the right taxes on milk cartons sold" becomes tricky.

However, this is parallelizable: You can work on all 30 countries at once and ship when ready. You can work on taking and organizing notes in parallel. You can work on scaling in parallel. You can streamline UX in parallel while introducing tagging, or trees, or groups, or anything.

A game, and especially a narrative game, has an intrinsic linear component, the plot. You can work on a certain amount in parallel, sure: Once the rough shape of the plot is laid out, you can start working on assets, necessary engine features, sounds, dialog in parallel.

But you still have a strong need that a player or play tester has a good progression from act one to act two to act three, and a good progression from puzzle one to puzzle two to puzzle three. This takes a lot of very slow iteration.

This involves human testing by nature. You get a playtest every few months, if you have the money. You can easily throw more CI hardware to run your integration tests more often for more countries. Playtesters, especially those who don't know the game, are very, very limited.

Then you also want characters and settings to be consistent across the plot. If done well, this takes a lot of adjustments and refinement both back and forth. Sometimes the setting of Act three requires a character to have a certain trait, and that trait should be developed, so you now go back to Acts one and two to see if you can build up the character -- without knocking down the entire house of cards already in place.

And once you get to polish and atmosphere, it becomes even harder and more time consuming, because then you need new playtesters even more.

From a past job and working on some features, I spent a day or two presenting like 6-8 different options, and then spent half a day in different testing groups to figure out which procedural generation option "feels the best" for what the game designer wants. With a better spec, that could've been an hour. This made players more excited. Probably.

Don't really have the context, but I'd trust the expert that it will get done on the schedule they want. I'd say people on the outside of things often ask these kinds of questions due to lacking any context on production schedules. See: the last time your PM said "can't we just..."

He's also a small shop and perhaps they intentionally move slower. I suspect he doesn't need to urgently get paid for this.

Story writing is probably non linear in time it takes, and I imagine there's a fair amount of waterfall. E.g you can't schedule voice actors until the story and dialogue is done. Oh wait, the voice actors have other commitments so they'll be by in 3 months. Etc.

I gave up the belief he could abstain from that after he ruined Return.

The Drifter is a great example of a slightly more modernized take on the classic adventure genre. Had a slow start and some grating voice acting, but gosh it ended up being a great experience.

Hint: The tech is not the hard part. The puzzles, stories, voice acting and animations take considerable time.

Even though Monkey Island now has a real (i.e. canonical) ending, it sucks. I prefer the original continuation of MI3 to the 25-years-late official, canonical sequel