Thimbleweed Park goes off the rails a bit near the end but it’s still a good game and has a lot of positives. The game has a great setting in the town; great characters; great dialogue; and great humour. The puzzles are a bit of a mixed bag. One thing the game didn’t do was make me go around trying random objects together in order to see what works which I applaud. The puzzles at least follow logic and reason, usually. Some were better than others but none made me filled with rage which a lot of games in this genre do. I do wish that you could have moved the characters as a group as sometimes moving all four to the same location takes more time than it would if you could do so. I also wish that I didn’t have to click “use” every time to open a door and could just click on the door. I also wish I could skip the audio of dialogues because sometimes if I accidentally clicked on a person I would have to hear things I had already heard and it was annoying. The map being able to fast travel was a god send. The game also does a good job of having their to do lists is you have a good idea of what you have to do although they could have done a better job giving hints as to where certain things were. There is an in game hint system where you can call a number in game for hints. I thought this was a fantastic idea but found the few times I used it that the hints didn’t help at all. Still the game did a fantastic job of recreating tropes from old school adventure games. What I mean in my original statement about the game going off the rails is that I didn’t like where the plot went in the last bit of the game. I wasn’t overly happy with many of the resolutions of the characters or with the general direction the story took. It made sense given the clues, I just wasn’t a huge fan I guess. The graphics of the game are what they are. As far as pixel games go things at least looked distinct and could be told apart. The voice acting was well done.
I played Thimbleweed park on Linux. It never crashed and I didn’t notice any bugs or glitches. There are no graphics settings at all. You can’t change the difficulty after starting the game. Alt-Tab didn’t work. You can save the game any time you want except for at the very end and there are nine save slots. Performance was great although given the visuals this wasn’t shocking. The game seemed to have a frame rate cap of 89 FPS which is strange. It was often maxing that out on my system so it was at least a higher cap than 60 which some games have.
Game Engine: Custom
Graphics API: OpenGL
Disk Space Used: 965 MB
Game Version Played: 1.0.958
GPU Usage: 2-15 %
VRAM Usage: 230-321 MB
CPU Usage: 4-7 %
RAM Usage: 2.1-2.6 GB
Frame Rate: 76-89 FPS
Plot issues aside I enjoyed my time with Thimbleweed Park. It was simply a comfy experience and I enjoyed spending time in the town and in the characters shoes. The puzzles were sane enough to keep me mostly happy. If you enjoy point and click games I recommend it. I finished the game on casual difficulty in seven hours and nineteen minutes. I paid $11.19 CAD for it and feel that this was a good price and even the normal current price of $21.99 isn’t bad if a tad high.
My System:
Intel i7-6700 | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | XFX RX 590 8GB Fat Boy | Mesa 22.2.3 | Samsung 870 QVO 1TB | Garuda | Mate 1.26.0 | Kernel 6.0.9-zen1-zen