Wonderful music and atmosphere, it's a world that feels very cozy and wholesome to return to.

Just based on the amount of hours I've spent in the game, Froguelike is already well worth its money. I love how the bugs and the frogs look (and the tongues!!). it's silly and fun and when you finally manage to make a build that can tank through hordes of bugs, it's so satisfying.

Yes, there are things that can be improved, but that's another reason why the game is worth it, the devs are listening to feedback and implementing updates weekly. I'm excited to see what comes next! All this for a few bucks? Seriously undervalued.

Finished any% in 4h, so good value/price. The puzzles are very clever and satisfying once you figure them out, even though it makes you question your intelligence (and existence) when you're one move away from gold and you can't see any logical possibility to improve any further. Getting to 100% will be a pain, but hopefully a rewarding one. Otherwise, very polished and juicy, just had to put my own music in the background.

Controls/VR:
I played it on the Valve Index and it feels great that you can pick and throw boomerangs by grabbing and releasing the controller. You can adjust the height of the tables and coolers so you don't have to bend if you don't want to, so good accessibility.

Content:
I'm writing this after the first play session (could do about an hour before my VR stamina ran out on the 2nd boss level). It seems I'm a bit over halfway through based on the map, but the difficulty is ramping up so it'll probably take me more than double that to complete it. And that's just to get through, I only got 3 stars on the first few levels. Getting all the stars will take quite some time. But yeah, the 2nd boss requires a lot of rotating around so it made me quit a bit sooner than I'd like, but that's just VR for you.

Art/Feel:
The game is funny enough in the trailer and the art/atmosphere feels even better in VR. The lighting especially gives the levels a nice look and the environments feel very cozy. It's just nice to be in the game's world, which is always a plus to me. And I'm a sucker for puns, so yup, the game has you covered there! :D

TL;DR: If you're looking for a silly, arcade-style game with satisfying controls, it nicely delivers what it promises in the trailer.

I already played a lot of Lords and Villeins as a patron on Patreon with access to early builds. I now just finished the tutorial level in the Early Access release and the game feels great! It's nice to play the bug free version with all the new art, balancing, and new AI behavior/mechanics. The core feel is the same as the pre-EA builds (which made me a fan in the first place), so I can speak of the game as I've experienced it in 30+ hours.

The game most reminds me of Settlers since economy and supply chains are such an important part. It's like Settlers, but you also get to build the houses yourself and see what goes into the production of all the materials and goods. It's great to learn how different things were made in medieval times as the game tries to stay close to historical accuracy. Making more and more complex workshops is a delight as you watch the villagers trade the necessary goods between each other.

Perhaps what I love the most (and why I keep coming back to the game) is the ambiance. The music is one of the best works from Adam Bow and shifts with the seasons, making every morning when a song kicks in a thing to look forward to. The trees shift colors through the months until winter hits with its white landscape. Seeing life go around in yearly cycles makes for a cosy environment to immerse yourself into, while also giving you the gameplay challenge of stocking up on food to survive through the cold.

From what I've seen so far, the team is definitely able to pull off their vision, so I'm excited to see all the improvements and new features still planned for early access.

Love the minimalistic art style. It makes gameplay information (when you can grab the walls, location of the portal) display really well and you can focus purely on getting the best path or fastest time through the level. Had much fun with the daily challenge (I only played the game on launch night so far), it really scratched my competitive itch. Would definitely recommend for any precision-platformer fan.

Disclaimer: I received a press copy to do my review, but I am also a backer (and Ransome Swear Jar contributor), so I spent my own money on it. I am a big fan of the game (and LucasArts adventures), so I was eager to fall in love with it. This review was originally published in Retronator Magazine (and it's way longer there).

Thimbleweed Park delivers on the promise of being a true old-school point-and-click adventure. It’s as if Maniac Mansion 2 wasn’t developed by Tim Schafer, Dave Grossman and others, but stayed in the hands of Ron Gilbert, Gary Winnick, David Fox and Mark Ferrari. Lucky for us, since both games ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ rule, I’m glad the two alternative histories both live in our lifetimes.

This comparison hits closer to home than expected. Just like in Day of the Tentacle, in Thimbleweed Park you don’t choose which characters will be part of the story — they all slowly unlock as the plot develops. Except instead of three, we get 5 of them.

You start with the two federal agents: experienced (and bitter) Ray and younger (and eager) Reyes. They are mostly interchangeable and give a nice choice of a cynical or cheerful commentary of the game’s world. Even though their lines are the same for the most part, the voice actors did a great job at breathing different life into each character.

You soon meet the supporting cast, which is an unexpectedly pleasant mix of bizarre, weird and humorous-a-reno.

As you investigate the murder, you cross paths with the other three playable characters and soon take control of their fate. Whereas the agents can both do the same things (with rare puzzles that involve both of them), the others are more specific as their backgrounds tie deeply into the history of Thimbleweed Park (the name of the degenerating town where the game takes place).

First we have Delores, a lovable game developer who’s in town for the will reading of her late uncle.

Franklin is Delores’ dad. Like the uncle, he is also dead. But still plenty kicking, even though he lacks a bit in the self-confidence department.

Finally, we have Ransome the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Insult Clown. Ah, Ransome. I need to give a special shout out to Ian Corlett who voiced the offensive clown. The hilarious writing together with his delivery make Ransome one of the best characters in the game — and I hate clowns, so this means a lot. In the game, all Ransome’s lines are beeped out, but Ian actually went all-out swearing in the recording sessions, so there’s a chance we’ll get an uncensored version at some point. I’d replay the game for that.

The five character arcs develop in parallel, but are mostly independent. Time-travel interactions in Day of the Tentacle were much more involved in that regard.

Each of the five characters is equipped with a list of goals that progress their story further. Some goals are shared (especially between the agents), and you’ll occasionally have to hand over an item from a character to another to help them out. Thimbleweed Park is very clear like that—you always know what you’re trying to do. In 1989, Ron Gilbert wrote an article titled Why Adventure Games Suck where he laid out rules of thumb he used while designing Monkey Island. Thanks to his rules, Monkey Island did away with stuff like dead ends, dying and arbitrary puzzles.

If Thimbleweed Park follows Maniac Mansion in its setting, the puzzle design clearly follows the later predecessor. While Monkey Island still had a sour monkey wrench in there or two, Thimbleweed Park perfects Ron’s philosophy.

I don’t remember when I last finished an adventure game without looking at a walkthrough at least once. Maybe even never. I finished Thimbleweed Park without any help though. That is not to say the game is easy. I was playing on ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Hard mode, alright?

It’s true that I was forced to not look at walkthroughs, since there weren’t any by the time I finished it (what with the game not being released and all). I was handed a real simulation of the eighties. Back then, if you got stuck in a game, you wrote a letter to your favorite magazine, they would print the letter in the readers section and if you were lucky, another reader who solved the puzzle would respond in the next month’s issue. It was kind of like having Internet with the latency of two months. Not something you can use when you have two weeks to write a review. The press were given a walkthrough a few days before the release though (when I’ve already licked all my fingers), so be suspicious of cheating bastards at other journalistic establishments.

But my success did not come (just) because I was forced to think with my own head (as you know, once you look up a single walkthrough clue, it’s an instant drug addiction and every time you get stuck, you go for the easy way out). No, puzzles in Thimbleweed Park simply make sense.

When I say puzzles, don’t forget that this is an old-school adventure game. Gameplay is a never-ending (well, after-15-hours ending) sequence of well-designed hurdles the game throws at you, mainly the townsfolk refusing to do what you want, or missing an item to do it. Coming up with solutions is most alike riddles: you have a setup with a bunch of clues, and when you figure the item or action that fits the problem, you feel really clever.

You always have a few open problems at hand, but it’s never so overwhelming that you’d have to resort to old-school frustrations such as trying to combine every possible item in your inventory. That will get you nowhere since there are no arbitrary solutions.

When I depleted my ideas on all loose ends, I simply turned off the game for the day and next time, with a fresh motivation to retrace my steps, the solution would always show up in a clue I missed. I can’t stress how much pride you get from being able to solve everything on your own.

Without getting into spoiler territory, I’ll say that the game’s ending holds up to a 10/10 rating for me. It’s not exactly the love/hate plot twist of Monkey Island 2, but close enough and it left me completely satisfied. Catharsis was strong.

It’s hard not to have a warm fuzzy feeling thinking about the game. I fell in love with the weird-a-reno town, and as funky as it is, I was always delighted to return. I don’t think I need to praise the art and voice actors any more (the art is fantastic, and I go into it in great detail in my Retronator Magazine article), but the music also contributes majorly to the Twin Peaks vibe the authors set to recreate. It’s a perfect match.

The tongue-in-cheek humor had me chuckling all throughout. It’s full of what we in the education space call multiple planes of engagement. Newcomers to adventuring will simply enjoy the puzzles and exploring, but there’s also another plane (get it?) of self-referencing writing that will reward the more demanding veterans of the genre.

Thanks to Kickstarter backers who were crowdsourced (=exploited as unpaid labor) to write in-game books and record answering machine messages, there’s even a ZX Spectrum mentioned in the game!

Gameplay, art, audio, writing … 10/10. If you're a fan of LucasArts adventures, you will not be disappointed.