I have a soft spot for point and click games. Maybe it’s nostalgia, maybe I just like the simplicity of the interface, but something makes me feel compelled to keep coming back to them, despite the fact I have beaten very few of them. Which brings us to PAX West and Thimbleweed Park. Developed by Seattle based Terrible Toybox, it is a supernatural murder mystery set in a little town in the middle of nowhere.
You start out the demo investigating a murder scene. A John Doe is sitting there rotting, and you need to look around for clues and find what you need to take a picture of the corpse. You play a couple of suspiciously familar looking rumpled federal agents at the beginning, and later in the demo control the world’s worst clown. Thimbleweed Park makes use of context sensitive commands and verbal cues, such as look at, pull, push etc. It’s also by the same people who made Maniac Mansion, so the game has a certain pedigree to uphold.
While the demo was pretty intuitive and fun once it got going, I was far more captivated by the overarching mythos and premise of the game than the controls themselves. While it’s fine to be retro for the sake of retro, I can’t help but wonder if there wasn’t a way to streamline the controls a bit. That said, the music and art direction of the game are phenomenal, and pretty much set the standard for wonderfully pixelated games. If Thimbleweed Park looks like something you might be interested in, it’s slated to release for PC, mobile and XBox One sometime in 2017. It should be an interesting little return to form for the point and click style of gaming.
