Does anyone remember Thimbleweed Park from 2017? Did anyone else think it was a very good homage to games like Maniac Mansion?But THIS was Ron Gilbert's follow up? What the actual fuck IS this? Does it genuinely scare the shit out of anyone else how unbelievably awful things have gotten in the 2020s?
>>723661046Didn’t know the Meyers Briggs personality test website guy made a game
>>723661046Monkey Island was never about graphics my zoomer friend
>>723661197It's antagonistically ugly an art style and is actively unpleasant to look at, Monkey Island was never about that
I think the difference is he worked on Thimbleweed Park along with Gary Winnick, who he had co-written Maniac Mansion with. It's clear that from conception Thimbleweed was meant as a throwback to the start of their adventure game design careers. The focus was on recapturing the mindset they had when developing Maniac Mansion. When you have multiple people there from the original project all focused on bringing back that old project, it's a bit harder to stray off the rails into ideas which the team didn't actually share. I think Gary being there helped keep things grounded. With the new Monkey Island game I think Ron Gilbert felt more free to explore more niche concepts that are separate from the original idea, since it's more expressly "his" game. I don't think the new artstyle is very good, but I can understand why he chose to go with it. Day of the Tentacle also was a massive artstyle and tone shift from the original Maniac Mansion, so I think the idea was the same, that the new Monkey Island would be it's own thing with it's own style mostly divorced from it's predecessors. Though the new style falls short by looking very cheap and unappealing. I think it's also a mistake to try inventing a new identity for a series that already has a very well established one from past titles, which is the same complaint Curse, Return, and Tales of all often have.
I couldn't finish Thimbleweed Park. It was boring.
>>723662756Wow, thanks for some actual info, what's Gary up to these days?It just strikes me as bizarre, Thimbleweed was 2017 and was great, just 5 years later Return was shit or at least I certainly can't get past the art style 2010s wasn't perfect, but it seems like cool things could still happen, we get to the 2020s and almost everything is garbage It's weird to be nostalgic for 2017 but here we are>>723663773it was no more boring than the games it was trying to emulate, if you expected modern pacing from that I don't know what to tell you, it lets you know the score right away by being literally set in 1987
>>723665440I actually meant to list Escape instead of Return in that other post, but I think you get the idea. The problem I think Return has is the same problem all the other Monkey Island revivals have. It's stuck between wanting to do it's own thing while also nostalgia farming the original game. It doesn't quite fit with the original tone where it tries to innovate, and where it pays homage it just feels like it's being a cheap imitation. I think Thimbleweed automatically had an advantage by simply being a new IP as well. It's inspired by Maniac Mansion but it's still able to stand out as something completely unique from Maniac Mansion. I wonder if Ron Gilbert even wanted to make another Monkey Island game or if he simply couldn't get a contract signed without the brand recognition bonus.
>>723666319and I'm sure Disney, being shitty and woke, mandated a lot of things too
