Glad to see a video spefically about the ending of Thimbleweed park cause the ending left me so confused and I kept trying to get a really different one. Also awesome editing!
Same. Tried to find videos, which would talk about the ending, and almost everyone say "play by yourself, ending is cool". I did, can we talk about it now? )
Before discussing Thimbleweed Park -- I do think that you do something of a disservice to the Monkey Island series, underrating the significance of Guybrush's coming of age story, his bildungsroman if you will. Some of his character growth over the course of the first game, and throughout the series is some real progress and change. His "reset" at the beginning of game 2 where Largo steals his fortune is a necessity of chiastic narrative (hardly the exclusive domain of the medium of the adventure game series). I think he does in fact become a mighty pirate, and even sells a plaque with his own spit on it in game 2 for a fortune, as "the spit of the man who killed LeChuck." If you accept the idea that he never becomes a pirate, that makes Wally's appearance in game 3, where he shows up as a pirate, an interesting and meaningful contrast, where a side character achieved guybrush's dream of game 1 entirely offscreen. Anyways, back to TP -- As far as why it is not as appealing as it should be, I think you're absolutely right. There's only so self-referential you can be before you just hollow yourself out. Adaptation does a very good job, Bo Burnham's inside is a masterwork that is SO artfully/impressively done that I feel compelled to forgive it's self indulgence. Thimbleweed Park's Nihilism is a bitter pill indeed. The undertale and DDLC comparisons are spot on about how they break convention and use self-reference to send a message to the player. The way I would talk about this is that they effectively reach "up" in their meta levels, creating a very successful address of their own context, whereas Thimbleweed Park _tries_ to do this, but is so lost in the "down" levels of mise en abyme, of stories within stories and games within games, that it fails. Combine this with the implicit attitude of disdain for games/his whole existence that it is very hard to be excited. One place that's striking me to draw further parallels are the two episodes about Dr. Moriarty in Star Trek the Next Generation which deal with arguably the same fundamental question -- What happens when you create a simulation of someone brilliant enough to understand that he's in a simulation. His efforts are geared at reaching as far outward as possible, to grow, to find the real world, to share it with the woman he loves.
Dang I just came back to watch this, and in the interm I took an existential philosophy class, and... I just gotta say, you nailed it. Great freakin' vid mate
The secret code that gets the algorithm to suggest this video to you: listen to the TP OST four times in a row. Boom, this pops up in the suggested vids.
To be honest, you are one of the things that I aspire to make a channel analyzing video games and series with a standard and good quality edition to capture my feelings about personal travels and stories of self-discovery. I hope you have more visits please, this is very good
Omg I never expected to find a video on this game. Humongous Entertainment games were my childhood, along with other point and click adventure games like Nancy Drew, and I really enjoyed Thimbleweed Park's ridiculous character writing/satire and was invested in the mysteries, but was likewise severely disappointed by the ending. Having not played any of these developers' previous games, it definitely felt like the whole game leaned so heavily on referencing their history in jokes that went right over my head, and the ending just felt like a complete cop-out, riding the trend of "characters realize they're in a game" meta twists that were so popular at the time, cheating me out of a true resolution to the murder mystery. And I'm not inherently against those twists at all and what they contribute -- I adore DDLC, and I plan to play Undertale eventually and know how good it is. But TP's meta twist felt like it came out of left field just for the sake of having it, basically. I still enjoyed my time with it, I didn't feel like my time was completely wasted, but it was definitely a disappointing reveal and ending that felt like it had little to do with the rest of the game. :(
Amazing work! Definitely wish your comment about the algorithm was proven wrong - I would have clicked on this in a heartbeat, but had to find it through a random search instead. Nevertheless, thoroughly enjoyed the video. :)
While i could see Chuck's reasoning, i feel like he had a better world to live in than Monika 😂, feel like a indie collab game of a group of self aware villains from different indies of different genres teaming up (canonically in all respective series) would be cool
tl;dr put me in the "this game" is absurdist camp. I found meaning in the characters' rebellion against the developers The long version: I find your analysis logical and well grounded. I experienced this game differently. For the ancient Greeks (and Catholics) there exist two types of time, Chronos, linear time (clocks dates etc) and Kairos, which is infinite or eternal time. I as a person have a finite amount of time, I was born, I am living I will die. I have set myself a purpose, further the well being of my wife and child. The characters in Thimbleweed Park live this out in miniature. Each gets their purpose fulfilled. Within her own perspective Chuck and Delores exert their will to stop time from progressing without their consent. For the time and narrative structure in this game (unless and until their is a sequel) time can loop but it cannot advance beyond the deletion and recovery of Thimbleweed Park. The developers and players push time foward, and Chuck and Delores push it back, eventually to the beginning. The characters are seemingly aware of this and unperturbed. The journalist who types up the story for Antonio Reyes gets her Pulitzer. What's more, the end of Thimbleweed Park within game is presented as a possiblility, but not the only one. When speaking with Franklin about whether deletion represents death or "returning to their real lives" Delores honesty says she doesn't know. Before entering the final wireframe Pillowtron Delores states Chuck is crazy and she is unsure of what will happen. Like all of us in real life, within their narrative confines the characters strive to achieve goals and deal with their own mortality and struggle to have agency. So for me they largely meet their main goals and strive to realize their agency. Also, Chuck posits a knowledge of our world, with worlds stacked within worlds like Russian dolls. Thimbleweed Park is the upper world for the text game as our world is the upperworld for Thimbleweed Park. And in the end the Commodore 64 restores the world so the in game characters can perform their function in our world, serving as characters within a story for our entertainment and contemplation, and for many of the players in the audience (like me) gratification as they achieve their goals. Finally the themes of change mortality and acceptance run throughout this game. As you stated we don't know explicitly what message Gilbert and crew intended, but the one I received was enjoyment of what was and acceptance of what is and will be.
I appreciate this reading. I don’t think really changes some of my feelings on the game, but I am glad folks out there have been able to take something more positive out of this.
Wow, great video! I think you have completely changed my outlook on the ending of this game (which soured me a bit at the time and lessened the impact of the remaining events of the story) and appreciate it a bit more. Definitely feel like replaying it now, liked and subbed!
[Monkey Island 2 spoilers, ignore this if you've not finished the game or had that ending spoiled already] This game's ending just comes off as a shallow version of Monkey Island 2's finale, lacking what made the vibe of the first two Monkey Island games clever and interesting to begin with - a world carefully constructed around making you THINK the various anachronistic elements are only there for comedy while the ending of the second game revealed their true purpose. I also don't find the character sprites in this game very appealing. I get that they're referencing Maniac Mansion... but Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, Sam & Max etc had such excellent cartoony designs and animation it's kinda hard to go back to characters that look like stiff bobbleheads. It's probably nostalgic gold to someone who got into adventure games through that game but yeah.
Best f***ing games those Lucasarts classic adventure games. Awesome stories, characters and best of all, environments and animations. All 2000s tryouts to revive that era, don't quite get there, but they're cool anyway. Broken Age, Thimbleweed, maybe Return to Monkey Island will !
I have not played Return to Monkey Island yet, but from what I have heard, this seems to be a similar concept brought forward within the game and especially its ending. I'm hoping that I enjoy it more than the ending of Thimbleweed Park.
Very interesting video. Henry, if you turn down the music in your vid slightly and get a better mic your content is already great and your channel will grow even more I think ! I kinda liked the ending to this game just because it was something different (we are used to well-rounded endings , open endings, etc) and the "back to maniac mansion" style change for Delores near the end and the commodore 64 restarting was a joy from a geeky perspective. I can understand why this doesn't make much sense to some people and I can even agree that it's weird. I'm starting to think that Ron wants the audience to realize that the journey / process of playing the game is more important than endings. And this is why Thimbleweed Park to me is still an outstanding game because PLAYING it was a joy along the way.
I love the work of the former Lucasfilm/Lucas Arts crazy guys but to be honest I was disappointed with the ending of this game. Rather than nihilism for me it mainly felt like "lazy writing". The ending of Thimbleweed Park for me kind of fell into the eye-rolling category of "it was all a dream", "everyone is dead" or like every time a super hero movie or comic invokes time travel to lazily fix a terribly written story.
@@HenryKathman I've always been partial to Pajama Sam! I often joke every piece of art I ever make is in some way a Pajama Sam reference, if you go down enough layers
Love the analysis. I thought the end of the game was clever and well-executed, and for me that was enough. The style of this video is great, but more care could be taken with things like pronunciation (“debuted”) and spelling (“Camus”).
i love love love loved this video. i want to say something smart and give more to this really interesting conversation, but i have nothing besides praise! video was flames🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
Oh interesting doing a video about this game, I knew about it thanks to Andy from outside xbox also not gonna lie your use of hands is a tiny bit a lot
I'm glad I didn't buy this one. I love classic adventuer games like "maniac mansion" and "monkey island", I would have hated the ending of this one for the same reason I hate the ending of Monkey Island 2 and its implication of "it's all a dream!, it's all a fantasy!". I like to believe the universe in the game "is real" and the events are actually happening. If it's all a dream or a simulation, everything becomes meaningless, it's all for nothing, characters don't matter, stories don't matter, stakes don't matter, it's all a waste of time.
I think those kinds of ends aren’t inherently bad, but I think when it uses them to dismiss the notion of caring about a story is when such endings become unsatisfying for me. Like one example of a game doing this well in my mind is pathologic, where it first tells the characters that the world is not real, only to remind them that the world was alway not real by the merit of being a game, and then allowing players to think about the value of caring about something even if it’s fictional. Like I said in the video, when something invites the notion of not caring about something and ridiculing someone for doing so, that where it crosses a line into eye roll territory
I think Monkey Island is able to get away with this due to how personal the stories are. They usually aren’t about saving the world. They revolve around Guybrush. Whether the events are 100% real or not doesn’t really matter as they do matter to Guybrush. He is a real person in the world and he is affected by the world.
@@HenryKathman ya, I was not judging. I couldn't put dark-blue dye on even when I bought it because it was too dwarnting. But your friends usually know what's best for you. Colorful hair rocks. Classic colorful hair rocks, as long as it what you are.
Glad to see a video spefically about the ending of Thimbleweed park cause the ending left me so confused and I kept trying to get a really different one. Also awesome editing!
Aw thank you!
Same. Tried to find videos, which would talk about the ending, and almost everyone say "play by yourself, ending is cool". I did, can we talk about it now? )
Just platinumed Thimbleweed Park last night and y'know what? I still don't know who killed Boris or Franklin or why.
Before discussing Thimbleweed Park -- I do think that you do something of a disservice to the Monkey Island series, underrating the significance of Guybrush's coming of age story, his bildungsroman if you will. Some of his character growth over the course of the first game, and throughout the series is some real progress and change. His "reset" at the beginning of game 2 where Largo steals his fortune is a necessity of chiastic narrative (hardly the exclusive domain of the medium of the adventure game series). I think he does in fact become a mighty pirate, and even sells a plaque with his own spit on it in game 2 for a fortune, as "the spit of the man who killed LeChuck." If you accept the idea that he never becomes a pirate, that makes Wally's appearance in game 3, where he shows up as a pirate, an interesting and meaningful contrast, where a side character achieved guybrush's dream of game 1 entirely offscreen.
Anyways, back to TP -- As far as why it is not as appealing as it should be, I think you're absolutely right. There's only so self-referential you can be before you just hollow yourself out. Adaptation does a very good job, Bo Burnham's inside is a masterwork that is SO artfully/impressively done that I feel compelled to forgive it's self indulgence. Thimbleweed Park's Nihilism is a bitter pill indeed. The undertale and DDLC comparisons are spot on about how they break convention and use self-reference to send a message to the player. The way I would talk about this is that they effectively reach "up" in their meta levels, creating a very successful address of their own context, whereas Thimbleweed Park _tries_ to do this, but is so lost in the "down" levels of mise en abyme, of stories within stories and games within games, that it fails. Combine this with the implicit attitude of disdain for games/his whole existence that it is very hard to be excited.
One place that's striking me to draw further parallels are the two episodes about Dr. Moriarty in Star Trek the Next Generation which deal with arguably the same fundamental question -- What happens when you create a simulation of someone brilliant enough to understand that he's in a simulation. His efforts are geared at reaching as far outward as possible, to grow, to find the real world, to share it with the woman he loves.
Dang I just came back to watch this, and in the interm I took an existential philosophy class, and... I just gotta say, you nailed it. Great freakin' vid mate
Thank you! I always try my best to make sure I am actually presenting these topics as accurately as possible.
The secret code that gets the algorithm to suggest this video to you: listen to the TP OST four times in a row. Boom, this pops up in the suggested vids.
I will say, this game does have a pretty rad soundtrack, so no complaints there!
To be honest, you are one of the things that I aspire to make a channel analyzing video games and series with a standard and good quality edition to capture my feelings about personal travels and stories of self-discovery. I hope you have more visits please, this is very good
Omg I never expected to find a video on this game. Humongous Entertainment games were my childhood, along with other point and click adventure games like Nancy Drew, and I really enjoyed Thimbleweed Park's ridiculous character writing/satire and was invested in the mysteries, but was likewise severely disappointed by the ending. Having not played any of these developers' previous games, it definitely felt like the whole game leaned so heavily on referencing their history in jokes that went right over my head, and the ending just felt like a complete cop-out, riding the trend of "characters realize they're in a game" meta twists that were so popular at the time, cheating me out of a true resolution to the murder mystery. And I'm not inherently against those twists at all and what they contribute -- I adore DDLC, and I plan to play Undertale eventually and know how good it is. But TP's meta twist felt like it came out of left field just for the sake of having it, basically. I still enjoyed my time with it, I didn't feel like my time was completely wasted, but it was definitely a disappointing reveal and ending that felt like it had little to do with the rest of the game. :(
I don’t necessarily agree with everything you’ve said but you make some solid points, and I’d love to hear more about adventure games from you
The genre has certainly attracted a lot of my attention this year.
Amazing work! Definitely wish your comment about the algorithm was proven wrong - I would have clicked on this in a heartbeat, but had to find it through a random search instead. Nevertheless, thoroughly enjoyed the video. :)
We’ll I thank your random searching and your kind comment
Wow, this video deserves more views for your editing alone.
While i could see Chuck's reasoning, i feel like he had a better world to live in than Monika 😂, feel like a indie collab game of a group of self aware villains from different indies of different genres teaming up (canonically in all respective series) would be cool
tl;dr put me in the "this game" is absurdist camp. I found meaning in the characters' rebellion against the developers
The long version:
I find your analysis logical and well grounded. I experienced this game differently. For the ancient Greeks (and Catholics) there exist two types of time, Chronos, linear time (clocks dates etc) and Kairos, which is infinite or eternal time. I as a person have a finite amount of time, I was born, I am living I will die. I have set myself a purpose, further the well being of my wife and child. The characters in Thimbleweed Park live this out in miniature. Each gets their purpose fulfilled. Within her own perspective Chuck and Delores exert their will to stop time from progressing without their consent. For the time and narrative structure in this game (unless and until their is a sequel) time can loop but it cannot advance beyond the deletion and recovery of Thimbleweed Park. The developers and players push time foward, and Chuck and Delores push it back, eventually to the beginning. The characters are seemingly aware of this and unperturbed. The journalist who types up the story for Antonio Reyes gets her Pulitzer.
What's more, the end of Thimbleweed Park within game is presented as a possiblility, but not the only one. When speaking with Franklin about whether deletion represents death or "returning to their real lives" Delores honesty says she doesn't know. Before entering the final wireframe Pillowtron Delores states Chuck is crazy and she is unsure of what will happen. Like all of us in real life, within their narrative confines the characters strive to achieve goals and deal with their own mortality and struggle to have agency. So for me they largely meet their main goals and strive to realize their agency.
Also, Chuck posits a knowledge of our world, with worlds stacked within worlds like Russian dolls. Thimbleweed Park is the upper world for the text game as our world is the upperworld for Thimbleweed Park. And in the end the Commodore 64 restores the world so the in game characters can perform their function in our world, serving as characters within a story for our entertainment and contemplation, and for many of the players in the audience (like me) gratification as they achieve their goals.
Finally the themes of change mortality and acceptance run throughout this game. As you stated we don't know explicitly what message Gilbert and crew intended, but the one I received was enjoyment of what was and acceptance of what is and will be.
I appreciate this reading. I don’t think really changes some of my feelings on the game, but I am glad folks out there have been able to take something more positive out of this.
Wow, great video! I think you have completely changed my outlook on the ending of this game (which soured me a bit at the time and lessened the impact of the remaining events of the story) and appreciate it a bit more. Definitely feel like replaying it now, liked and subbed!
[Monkey Island 2 spoilers, ignore this if you've not finished the game or had that ending spoiled already] This game's ending just comes off as a shallow version of Monkey Island 2's finale, lacking what made the vibe of the first two Monkey Island games clever and interesting to begin with - a world carefully constructed around making you THINK the various anachronistic elements are only there for comedy while the ending of the second game revealed their true purpose.
I also don't find the character sprites in this game very appealing. I get that they're referencing Maniac Mansion... but Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, Sam & Max etc had such excellent cartoony designs and animation it's kinda hard to go back to characters that look like stiff bobbleheads. It's probably nostalgic gold to someone who got into adventure games through that game but yeah.
Nice work for real. It's a top tier work
Best f***ing games those Lucasarts classic adventure games. Awesome stories, characters and best of all, environments and animations. All 2000s tryouts to revive that era, don't quite get there, but they're cool anyway. Broken Age, Thimbleweed, maybe Return to Monkey Island will !
Nope :(
Return to Monkey Island turned out to be a piece of turd :(
The ending of this game is utter trash. I hated it.
Much of this video was spurred on by pure spite towards this ending.
Don’t you feel the concept and deep meaning is similar to return of monkey island ?
I have not played Return to Monkey Island yet, but from what I have heard, this seems to be a similar concept brought forward within the game and especially its ending. I'm hoping that I enjoy it more than the ending of Thimbleweed Park.
Very interesting video. Henry, if you turn down the music in your vid slightly and get a better mic your content is already great and your channel will grow even more I think !
I kinda liked the ending to this game just because it was something different (we are used to well-rounded endings , open endings, etc) and the "back to maniac mansion" style change for Delores near the end and the commodore 64 restarting was a joy from a geeky perspective. I can understand why this doesn't make much sense to some people and I can even agree that it's weird. I'm starting to think that Ron wants the audience to realize that the journey / process of playing the game is more important than endings. And this is why Thimbleweed Park to me is still an outstanding game because PLAYING it was a joy along the way.
Incredible stuff! I see you were also heavily inspired by Innuendo Studios! I love his stuff. Your editing this video was superb. Excellent job there
I love the work of the former Lucasfilm/Lucas Arts crazy guys but to be honest I was disappointed with the ending of this game. Rather than nihilism for me it mainly felt like "lazy writing".
The ending of Thimbleweed Park for me kind of fell into the eye-rolling category of "it was all a dream", "everyone is dead" or like every time a super hero movie or comic invokes time travel to lazily fix a terribly written story.
Not only have I just discovered your channel, you're a humongous entertainment fan as well!!! :D I'm delighted!
Humongous Entertainment is the absolute GOAT
Putt Putt forever
@@HenryKathman I've always been partial to Pajama Sam! I often joke every piece of art I ever make is in some way a Pajama Sam reference, if you go down enough layers
This is cool, thank you.
Glad you liked it!
Love the analysis. I thought the end of the game was clever and well-executed, and for me that was enough. The style of this video is great, but more care could be taken with things like pronunciation (“debuted”) and spelling (“Camus”).
That was some deep *beeeeep* I’ve just seen!
i love love love loved this video. i want to say something smart and give more to this really interesting conversation, but i have nothing besides praise! video was flames🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
Great video friend!
Oh interesting doing a video about this game, I knew about it thanks to Andy from outside xbox
also not gonna lie your use of hands is a tiny bit a lot
Wait Andy was talking about my vid? Cool.
Also my hands do what they want.
The Gays Can Do What They Want.
And the same is true of our beautiful neurodivergent siblings.
@@Furore2323 why bring up sexuality and neurodivergenece? Is hand moving related to that, i myself am Bi and dont have excessive hand movement
@@suisui7481 The first is a Stephanie Sterling reference, the second is pretty commonplace.
I hated the ending of this game so much.
I might not make that creepy video actually
I'm glad I didn't buy this one. I love classic adventuer games like "maniac mansion" and "monkey island", I would have hated the ending of this one for the same reason I hate the ending of Monkey Island 2 and its implication of "it's all a dream!, it's all a fantasy!".
I like to believe the universe in the game "is real" and the events are actually happening. If it's all a dream or a simulation, everything becomes meaningless, it's all for nothing, characters don't matter, stories don't matter, stakes don't matter, it's all a waste of time.
I think those kinds of ends aren’t inherently bad, but I think when it uses them to dismiss the notion of caring about a story is when such endings become unsatisfying for me. Like one example of a game doing this well in my mind is pathologic, where it first tells the characters that the world is not real, only to remind them that the world was alway not real by the merit of being a game, and then allowing players to think about the value of caring about something even if it’s fictional. Like I said in the video, when something invites the notion of not caring about something and ridiculing someone for doing so, that where it crosses a line into eye roll territory
I think Monkey Island is able to get away with this due to how personal the stories are. They usually aren’t about saving the world. They revolve around Guybrush. Whether the events are 100% real or not doesn’t really matter as they do matter to Guybrush. He is a real person in the world and he is affected by the world.
Lol down the free moded version of it I would say I definitely loved!loved LOVED the gameplay it was so much funnn u should try
I like your brown hair and stern voice better anyways.
To quote Brian David Gilbert, “I'm not your friend, and you have no say over what I do with my body.”
@@HenryKathman ya, I was not judging. I couldn't put dark-blue dye on even when I bought it because it was too dwarnting. But your friends usually know what's best for you. Colorful hair rocks. Classic colorful hair rocks, as long as it what you are.
Stop talking@@baneuntaned2546
I like your profile pic better than your real life
Nice work for real. It's a top tier work