Before I left for my trip to Virginia which I’m currently on (for work), I started playing Thimbleweed Park on the Xbox One, and had a blast with it. I didn’t get very far, but the voice acting, art and overall design were all excellent, and I enjoyed every moment I played. I brought my PS4 with me for this trip (mostly to work on Persona 5), and while browsing the store last week I saw that Day of the Tentacle Remastered and Grim Fandango Remastered were both on sale. I ended up downloading both, and finally started Day of the Tentacle this weekend.

I never really got into adventure games during my early PC gaming days. I remember fooling around with a few King’s Quest games, but never really being able to figure out what to do and in the end I’d go back to playing games like Wheel of Fortune, Ghostbusters and various FMV games (I remember this Battleship game that came on something like 14 disks!). Therefore Thimbleweed Park served as a way to ease into the older style of adventure game that became popular in the early 90’s. It introduced me to a simplified version of adventure game mechanics that carried over quite well to Day of the Tentacle.

One thing that immediately struck me upon starting Day of the Tentacle was the stellar music and voice acting. I didn’t expect the game to sound so good! I loved all of the voice acting, and the high quality remastered art helped bring the world to life. I was in love! It also helped that the early puzzles were pretty easy to solve, and things got moving quicker than I expected. Unfortunately, after an hour or two things slowed down and I found myself getting stuck pretty often, unable to advance the story. I ended up peeking at a guide a few times to keep things moving smoothly, and there were certainly some solutions I would have never figured out.

The game’s controls were simplified enough to make it playable on a console, but I did find moving the cursor around to be a little slow at times. Also the sluggish character movement got annoying when I knew exactly where I needed to go next, but had to click through several screens to get there. That’s one thing Thimbleweed Park improved on with its sprint button (I know I’m comparing a 2017 game to a nearly thirty year old game, but it’s hard not to do).

Overall I enjoyed the experience, and look forward to checking out Grim Fandango next. Ultimately, I’m pretty excited to get back home and dig back into Thimbleweed Park after getting my feet wet with some games it takes inspiration form.