alt Hacker NewsI hope Ron Gilbert has more stories he wants to tell that aren't meta-reflections on adventure games as a form.
Thimbleweed Park was fine—not what I was hoping for, but fine. When I saw Return to Monkey Island was more of that—while I appreciate taking that tack as a way to sort of give closure to the second game and also the rest of the series, sort of—I decided it wasn't for me.
Now a second Thimbleweed Park has been announced, and I expect it to be more of the same sort of thing, which is kind of a bummer? Deconstruction is fun, but it's better when it leads to reconstruction thereafter. I would love to see Gilbert tackle a genuine adventure game again, without all of (or at least, with less of) the navel-gazing postmodernism—just to prove the genre and creator both still have the capacity for genuinely good works that stand on their own. Am I the only one?
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Thimbleweed Park was a fine game with a very disappointing ending, as was RTMI sadly. I was also fine with Return's more "streamlined" game approach, but I would've liked the games to have a real storyline with a real ending instead of some kind of meta story where the journey is more important or whatever. I just lose interest almost immediately... I wanted to play Thimbleweed Park's free "mini-game" that he released during Covid, but just couldn't make myself play it due to the ending of Thimbleweed Park.
Sadly, I had a somewhat similar disappointing experience with Dreamfall: Chapters (although it was a worse game than Gilbert's games), as The Longest Journey is, IMO, one of the best adventure games ever. I played it as the episodes were released, and wanted to get back to it as they improved many things post-completion, but the could never force myself to do it.
There are still adventure games that are great that are released today by other people though.
I thought Return to Monkey Island did a very good job with it, and it was indeed exactly what MI2 was trying to say and what MI1 even foreshadowed, just refined with the time away from the project. It answered "What was Ron trying to say in the MI3 he wanted to write?" and it ended up doing it without diminishing Curse, Tales, or even Escape, and somewhat including them in the fun. (More Curse and Tales than Escape, it certainly ignored/retconned Escape events, but Escape's appeal has always been smaller.)