Quests have been in crisis for a long time. If the “long-playing” series such as “Dreamfall Chapters” everything is not bad, because there initially everything was quite well thought out, and series such as “Nancy Drew”, “Carol Reed” or Telltale Games are held by professionalism and tradition, but the attempts of deserving masters to reintroduce hits at the level of previous ones are usually very flawed. The fifth part of “Broken Sword”, released thanks to the fans, and did not think to develop the history of the heroes, and greatly violated the style and gameplay of the series. Tim Schafer’s complex project “Broken Age” is also ambiguously accepted. To put it mildly, many recent projects like “Lost Horizon 2” or “Yesterday Origins” are controversial. Yes, and expected for more than a decade “Syberia 3”, in fact, had little to say, satisfying not all fans. Only Pokey pleased us with the fourth “Deponia”, but he laughed in our faces, making it a spin-off and not giving the desired happy ending. The genre is too early to bury, it has been buried for almost twenty years, but it is still at a crossroads and treads on the ground, not knowing how and where to develop, and therefore even professionals can not return it to its former quality. Questers have to choose, mainly between indie games of varying degrees of quality and from a fairly thin layer of quests level AAA, which are now less and less.
But it finally happened! It had happened! What seemed almost miraculous has finally come to fruition. On the defense of the genre came old Ron Gilbert, the author of genre icons – famous LucasArts games such as “Maniac Mansion”, “Day of the Tentacle”, “Monkey Island” – literally a legend of the quest world, who still pulls this thankless load to the best of his ability. And this is a man who released his first game almost 25 years ago. Think about that number! An entire era has passed in that time. Several, in fact. And while Ron Gilbert has never left the industry, creating other games, and even made his mark recently with the rather original “The Cave” – nothing seemed to herald a return.
But at the end of 2014 Ron Gilbert decided to shake the old days and went on Kickstarter with a promise to create a quest in the style of LucasArts with a proper amount of 365 thousand dollars. Not that much, by the way. Charles Sessile for the fifth Broken Sword seemed to ask for a million, and the game ended up costing two. Tim Schafer made “Broken Age” for three and a half. The success exceeded all expectations: instead of the requested 375 thousand dollars fans gave almost twice as much – 626 thousand. After that Ron Gilbert worked on the game for almost two years, releasing it instead of summer 2016 only on March 30, 2017, but it grew in size and became more complex and beautiful.
Let’s say at once that the team’s ideas were realized to the fullest! You can dance with joy. This game is a gift for any fan of LucasArts quests and fans of quests in general (except for fans of Mystoids, they can be free). It’s a giant gaming monument to Ron Gilbert’s quests. Just the destruction of the fourth wall, pass-halts, quotes and self-citations, declarations of love for quests from the heroes I counted forty pieces during the game. And there are much more! What is worth the constant talk about quests, the mentioned company with the transparent name MMucasFlem or the incessant references to other games of the authors. Some quotes are inserted straight into the forehead. If you try, you’ll catch a glimpse of a legendary scene from “Monkey Island” – a pirate treasure hiding place, which in the original was impossible to dig up unless the player had time to get a shovel. At the beginning of the game, though, you’ll get a chainsaw that’s easy to find gasoline for – and you can use it; the same chainsaw will hang on the wall in the finale. It’s a more obscure reference to Maniac Mansion, where the chainsaw was impossible to refuel. That damn chainsaw was later recalled in “Zak McKracken”, “Monkey Island 2”, “Day of the Tentacle”, and “Full Throttle” – without it now!
The same spirit of the original quests is at the heart of the entire game design. “Thimbleweed Park” is drawn in 16-bit pixel 2D with its straight frames and inactive items brought to the foreground, as was the custom then. The game also has command-verb controls in a special panel next to the inventory and a Commodore 64-like font. And by the way, we should thank Ron Gilbert for greatly expanding the game’s capabilities and allowing to play on a wide monitor, because at first it looked even more like 80’s quests with their meager animation and 16 colors.
The game begins with a certain man being murdered in the town of Timblyweed Park. Two federal agents arrive to investigate: junior agent Antonio Reyes and senior agent Angela Ray. Reyes is more naive and stupid, Angela is smarter and more cynical. As it should be in the quests “in the spirit of LucasArts”, almost from the beginning you need to get a certain set of items – in this case, to collect evidence for the arrest of the guilty. But from the middle you will forget about the murder, because you will have to deal with much more important matters connected with the town’s past. The thing is that it developed around the PillowTronics company – the pillow factory of local millionaire Chuck Edmund, a cybernetics genius who stuffed the town with automatons on light bulbs no worse than Hans Foralberg stuffed Vladlen with automatons.
And this, as it was said before, is the main goal of the game and everything here works for it. Like other Ron Gilbert games, namely “Maniac Mansion” and “The Cave”, here again you will have to control a lot of characters. Besides the agents they are also Ransom the clown from the local abandoned circus, Chuck’s niece Dolores and Chuck’s brother Fran, who quickly dies and further becomes a ghost. These characters are mostly needed to expand the story and mine additional items. The most impressive of this trio is, of course, Ransom the Clown, a boor, a cad and an ardent swearer, who thickly intersperses his speech with carefully spelled mate – on which the lion’s share of humor is based. You can’t help but laugh when watching him ragefully screaming at the whole neighborhood in case of failure – I personally cried like a baby. The rest of the characters aren’t as special, but they too have a part of their own story…. After all, it was Dolores who inherited the factory after breaking her uncle’s inhibitions and taking the most despicable job in the 80s – a developer of computer games, those “murder simulators” (s)!