It starts with a murder mystery near the town of Thimbleweed Park. You control two federal agents charged with solving this murder but who also have secret agendas of their own. You learn that the town is largely deserted after the Pillowtronics Factory burned down and its founder recently died. The town has descended into disrepair as a result of the fire, and the townspeople are definitely hiding something-a-reno. I'm looking at you Sheriff.
You later get access to other playable characters, Delores, an aspiring video game programmer; Ransome, the Insult Clown; and Franklin, a ghost with some unfinished business. Each of these characters have their own agendas and have their own puzzles to solve and also are used to solve the other characters' puzzles. Switching back and forth between them is nice because you're rarely in a position where you are completely stuck on all potential puzzles. So you can generally make progress of some kind and never want to rage quit or throw your computer off a cliff.
It's weird, though, but I like being stuck in an adventure game, to a degree. I like when they make me think outside the box. I like when I try a bunch of different things, many of which I thought was a damn good idea, but it's not quite the right one. I like when the actual solution makes me laugh. I'll throw an example at you. Quit reading if you want absolutely zero puzzle spoilers. I needed to get a book on the third level of a library, but the staircase was Out of Order, so sayeth the sign hanging on it. I thought maybe I needed to fix it myself. I did have wood available to me, but it was firewood, and I had no tools. There was a phone nearby. I thought perhaps I needed to call a repairman of some sort, so I looked through the many pages of the phone book. Nothing really fit the bill. On a lark, I just picked up the Out of Order sign, and I could then use the staircase. Ha! I felt incredibly pleased with this solution.
Some may give the adventure genre shit for this pick everything up that isn't nailed down approach, but to me, having a bunch of garbage in your inventory that has a purpose that will in time become clear makes carrying all that junk all the sweeter once you figure it out. And once you get stuck, the inevitable try using everything on everything else tactic gave me joy. I have heard people declare that a weakness of the genre, but one of my favorite ridiculous solutions of adventure games ever was in Sam and Max: Hit the Road where you use the broken golf ball retriever, combined with a severed hand, and a giant magnet and used this frankenobject on a giant ball of twine to find a lost mood ring while Max comments on how highly improbable that was to have worked.
One thing I really liked about this game was that they know how people who like adventure games think, so they'd use that to throw you off or they'd throw little Easter eggs in there for those long time fans of the genre. For example, I really enjoyed that due to my pick up everything not nailed down approach, I ended up with a severed head that looked like the Navigator head from Monkey Island. That alone made me smile, and I didn't really expect it to have a use. Later though, I came across one of those find your way through this non-navigable forest puzzles similar to that same Monkey Island puzzle the Navigator head was from, so I whipped it out. It did indeed lead the way, not to the location I needed to progress the storyline, but to the location of previously dug up treasure for "another game", which was Monkey Island. Yes. Yesyesyes.
Overall, I was just awash in nostalgia and grinning the whole time to have this new adventure game enter the arena. It is of the same family of games that I grew up with, love, and have played over and over and over. It makes me happy that as games continue to focus on better and better graphics that there are still people willing to make and people itching to play a funnily written pixel art game. I hope there are more to come. Ron Gilbert, I will play anything you make, sir.
