Adventure Gamers - Forums

Well, 11 hours in and I’m still not done, but thus far, I think it’s better than merely good. I love the atmosphere, the mood of the piece, there’s a nice Twin Peaks-ish mixture of humour and surrealness to the whole affair that’s right up my alley.

The adventure game meta- references (well, let’s be honest, it’s more like Monkey Island/Maniac Mansion/LucasFilm meta-references, as they’re basically the only things being referenced outside the odd Sierra dig) come on a little thick in the beginning, but the design of the game and the world is as good as any recent adventure game I’ve come across.

Love. It.

Finished it right now.

I liked it, it’s a good game, but i’ve mixed feelings about it. I hate to be a partypooper, but since so many people found it nearly perfect it won’t hurt much to say why for me it’s far from it.

The characters don’t really interact with each other or have any reason to do so, making it all feel very superficial. The world is huge, but the puzzles feel very limited. The inventory is mostly filled with red herrings…

I dunno, it’s not what i was expecting. It was fun though, can’t deny that.

There was one thing i didn’t understand, maybe someone can help me. At one point, agent Reyes is kidnapped by the coroner and the lady of the tubes shop. He couldn’t be selected for a while. Then he is available again without explanation, just a note on his notebook about passing out and feeling better. What was that about??

sordy-wordy - 04 April 2017 01:13 AM

There was one thing i didn’t understand, maybe someone can help me. At one point, agent Reyes is kidnapped by the coroner and the lady of the tubes shop. He couldn’t be selected for a while. Then he is available again without explanation, just a note on his notebook about passing out and feeling better. What was that about??

I dont’t own the game yet, nor have i played it. The only reason for this is a lack of time (it’s on my To-do list) 

Having said that, this sounds like a typical scenario that might be better explained when playing the game on hard mode (assuming you haven’t done so).
It could be that a quick fix to bypass a lot of tough side-track puzzles caused a gap in the story for those playing on a lower difficulty.

If you did play it on anything lower than the highest difficulty setting, it would be interesting to either:
a) learn from someone who played it on the highest difficulty whether the scenario made more sense to him/her or
b) replay the game on the highest difficulty level

On hardest difficulty, this still remains unexplained. Actually, a considerable amount doesn’t make much sense until the very end, so a replay might be worth doing.

Overall I thought this was a terrific game. I would definitely have liked the characters to interact with each other. It didn’t make a huge amount of sense that you can have one character learn something that another character can immediately act on. In the Blackwell series if you plan something you need to interact between the characters to some degree. It would have slowed down the game quite a bit though.

Yeah, that was weird, and it is never explained in any clear way. It also seems a bit pointless: does it have any effect at all on the story or gameplay? (I wonder what happens if Reyes has the inventory items you need to progress at that point in the game.)

As long as the characters could reasonably communicate and coordinate their actions (and are motivated to do so), I don’t really mind if the game doesn’t require me to do so explicitly: I just imagine that they’ve planned it all out “off screen”. But there were a lot of puzzles in this game where the multiplayer parts don’t really make sense. Like, why would two FBI agents suddenly start working with an outcast circus clown to solve a murder case? (In fact, the two people they recruit to help them out are the two people, apart from Willie, who have been fingered as suspects in the case.) And why is he, a guy who doesn’t trust the feds (he refuses to let them onto his property), suddenly so motivated to help them out? To me, the obvious comparison is Resonance, which has a similar mechanic, but makes sure to establish a reason why these people are working together.

Or take a couple of puzzles involving the ghost, Franklin. Like when you have him call the bank and moan, so he can distract the manager, allowing another character to steal the key to the factory. How could he possibly have been in on that plan? He can’t even open the phone book, so even if two other characters had gone to the hotel to talk about it so he could overhear them, he wouldn’t know the phone number to call. Or later, when all the other characters are trapped in the factory, and he has to call the phone number to shut off the PillowTron 3000 cooling fan. In that case, there really is no way whatsoever for him to find out about it.

In some of the classic LucasArts games, when characters did things they had no character-motivation to do just to solve a puzzle, they would break the fourth wall to say something like “I’m not sure why I did that”. That would at least hang a hat on it, acknowledging the lapse of in-game logic. But even though Thimbleweed Park breaks the fourth wall incessantly for no good reason, it doesn’t bother when it would actually be useful.

I think it’s a brilliant game, far from 5 out of 5 but a lot of fun never the less!

I agree there seems to be no logical connection between the character and Ray and Reyes keep saying they should work together but so far I have seen no reason to use both characters, I’m on Part 4 and I have pretty much not used Reyes at all after Ray was knocked out.

It would have been fun if the characters had been able to talk to each other and also if they had spent more time on the dialogue. Most of the time, they all say the same thing and the answers they get is the same as well. Sometimes they don’t even bother voicing what they say. It just seems like the only reason to switch character so far is because some characters aren’t able to go where some other character can go.

It’s a fantastic game when it comes to length and puzzles but the characters are a missed opportunity. They all feel rather empty and flat and none of them including the playable ones feel very memorable, they range from annoying to decent enough, guess that’s why I never felt the need to play as Reyes as his character was just a boring version of Ray to me. Switching between them only seemed to serve to slow the game down, it’s too bad they didn’t put more effort into characters and dialogue and story as that’s such important parts of the game, I’d give it 3 out of 5! In that sense it’s a lot like Maniac Mansion I suppose.

I’m not english native speaking, so maybe I don’t have a say on this,...but isn’t the voice acting pretty… bad?

I’m almost nearing the end of the game & my thought so far is that I’ve been completely engrossed, as & when I can be, for the best part of 18 hours & I’m not quite finished yet!  The game is so full of love & dedication - the voice acting is great & I love the way that Franklin as a ghost has some way of interacting with the living world to make a difference & hey no! not in the same way as in the Blackwell games if anyone was comparing?.
I like that the different playable characters can do/acquire a few different things on an individual basis that can be swapped which can be considered as part of the puzzling to juggle between the different paths but unfortunately from the story point of view that’s all it is. There’s just a sore lack of interaction between the characters {as done not too badly in Resonance) which for me demotes the game to a 4+ rating rather than the perfect 5! Just to add that you end up caring about the characters less as they just seem remote. 
Otherwise for me it’s been a delight to play with just a little more to do to finish!   

I don’t even think character interaction would have helped, there’s just something about the whole game I can’t quite put my finger on it, it’s everything, it feels like the story is maybe so unclear and shallow that you don’t really care about it. The more i play, the more I feel like the game truly is only about the puzzles and nothing about the story or character.

But considering most adventure games now a days, esp from Telltales is nothing about puzzles and all about characters and story, this is a nice change. I just wish they’d taken more time to make the game feel like a proper Lucas Arts game but that’s probably too much to ask for.

Yeah sorry it was a bit lazily put, I suppose I was hoping for the game to be more similar to every single Lucas Art game coming out after Maniac Mansion.

This game felt the most similar to Maniac Mansion which to me is the weakest when it comes to characters and story. That’s just my view, I was hoping it’d be more similar to Day of the Tentacles or The Dig which I felt handled multiple playable characters much better!

I think the problem is that there’s so many stories going on and they’re all seemingly not connected to each other, it makes it feel like you’re not sure who’s story you’re following. Why is Delores and Ransome helping the FBI agents, what are they getting out of it? Why did they even decide to help them and what’s really their stories even about? Ray and reyes keep going on and on about how they need to solve the murder so they can move on with their original plan, but why? Why bother when both of them have more important things on their mind?

I just don’t feel like I care or connect with the story or the characters, it doesn’t make it a bad game. I felt the same when playing Hopkins FBI, Discworld 1, Neverhood and City of lost Children. But when it’s Ron Gilbert I expect more.

Ok, I’ve finished it. It’s really is a great game, I had doubts about it and didn’t back it on kickstarter and now I regret not doing so

I stand by my earlier comment regarding the verb interface and I wish it would have been possible to talk between the different characters and this is the only reason why I’d give it 4.5/5 instead of 5.

Apart from that, the world building was a lot of fun, the story kept me interested till the end and I loved the twist. Graphically, it’s gorgeous and way better than I expected when I first heard about the kickstarter. Puzzles were mostly quite good and fun to figure out. I did get badly stuck at one point. I hadn’t seen the red googles and had read the hint book text without using them, so I knew that we needed to enter FIZZSCUMM but since I hadn’t used the red googles on the book, delores didn’t allow me to do that.

Lastly, the sound design is really good. At one point, I thought the dogs’ barks were from outside in the street…

Well I started playing and so far I’m enjoying it. I think the verb interface is more a stylistic choice than anything else. They could have easily used a look/use dual function - I don’t think I have really used anything else other than talk, which you can click “use” anyway. Their first thought when designing the game was probably “we’re going to make this like Maniac Mansion” and stuck with the verb table.