According to an article at GamesBeat, the creators of the ground-breaking point-and-click adventure game "Maniac Mansion," Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick, are back with what they're calling "the true spiritual successor" to that Lucasfilm Games classic, called "Thimbleweed Park."
Gilbert and Winnick are taking "Thimbleweed Park" to Kickstarter, hoping to raise $375,000 to create the retro, point-and-click adventure. "Thimbleweed Park," they say, "cuts to the core of what made classic point-and-click adventure games so special ... It's deep, it's challenging, it's funny, it's everything you loved about adventure games."
"It's like opening a dusty old desk drawer and finding an undiscovered LucasArts adventure game you've never played before," the game's Kickstarter page reads.
The game will weave the tale of a pair of "washed-up detectives" who are called in to investigate a murder in the titular town that "once boasted an opulent hotel, a vibrant business district and the state's largest pillow factory, but now teeters on the edge of oblivion and continues to exist for no real reason."
Players will take control of five playable characters and solve puzzles using the classic verb interface based on LucasArts' SCUMM engine...much like "Maniac Mansion." Some of the items shown in a gameplay video include a balloon animal, a can of tuna and what appears to be the chainsaw taken directly out of "Maniac Mansion." With its 8-bit, big pixel style and old-school interface, "Thimbleweed Park" "strips away all the cruft built up over the years and is distilled down to what we loved about the genre," the game's creators say.
Gilbert and Winnick say they'll be the "core of the team" behind Thimbleweed Park, adding a handful of other team members as game development progresses. "We're fully devoting ourselves to Thimbleweed Park in the same way we did Maniac Mansion, Monkey Island and everything else we do," they say.
"Thimbleweed Park" is being developed for Linux, Mac, and Windows PC, and has an estimated release of June 2016. You can check out the Kickstarter video below:
