Thimbleweed Park 2: A First Look, in Rough Black and White

Ron Gilbert has let us see inside Thimbleweed Park 2 for the first time, and what he has chosen to show is a game that is nowhere near finished. The first in-game images on the development blog are rough, grey placeholder rooms: the working sketches most studios keep well out of sight.

So do not take them as the look of the game. Gilbert calls these rooms thumbnails. During pre-production the whole adventure is built out of them, quick black and white stand-ins that go into the engine so the puzzles can be wired up and played long before anyone paints a final background. If a room turns out not to earn its place, it can be cut or redrawn and almost nothing is lost. It is a lesson from the first two Monkey Island games, he says, where the art went straight to final and throwing a room away hurt.

What the thumbnails show

Rough as they are, there is plenty to pore over. The first is the Mansion Parlor, a book-lined room with a fireplace where the suspects have been gathered, as tradition demands. The characters are already in full colour, which makes them look as if they have wandered onto a pencil drawing, and one of them is hard to miss: a clown in a red wig holding a balloon, who looks a lot like Ransome. Gilbert adds that in the finished game they will not all be standing around like this. Everyone was put in the room so the team could test the dialogue.

The second puts Agent Reyes in a junkyard at night, in front of a chain-link fence topped with razor wire, with heaps of scrap in silhouette behind it. The third is the pick of the three: the mansion rooftop, all turrets, weathervanes and smoking chimneys under a starry sky, with a walkway leading to a lonely chair and table. That one will be framed closer in the final game.

Octavi Navarro is drawing the thumbnails and David Fox is wiring them up. Mark Ferrari joins the project in December, and the two artists will share the final backgrounds, as they did on the first game. What Thimbleweed Park 2 really looks like is still to come.

The story so far

If the sequel passed you by: Gilbert announced it on his Grumpy Gamer blog on July 30, promising good news and bad news before admitting, “There is no bad news, it’s all good news.” Production had just begun, with a release planned for 2028.

Two things stand out. The first game was funded on Kickstarter back in 2014; this one is not. Terrible Toybox is publishing it with the backing of a private investor. And the band is back together: Gary Winnick, David Fox, Mark Ferrari, Octavi Navarro and Robert Megone all return, with Steve Kirk on music. In October they were joined by Dave Grossman as writer, the co-designer of Day of the Tentacle and Gilbert’s writing partner on Return to Monkey Island. For anyone who grew up on LucasArts adventures, that is quite a credits list.

As for the plot, there is a body at the Edmund Mansion and Agents Ray and Reyes are on the case, in what the studio calls a spoof of a classic whodunit where everyone in the house is a suspect. It is billed as neither quite a sequel nor quite a prequel. Anyone who remembers how the first game ended will wonder how that can work, and Gilbert seems to be enjoying the question.

Thimbleweed Park 2 is planned for Windows, macOS and Linux, with GOG and Nintendo Switch versions to follow. You can see the three images on the development blog, which is updated several times a month and comes with a podcast, and wishlist the game on Steam. We have a page for the game and will be following along.

New to the town? Start with Thimbleweed Park and our walkthrough, or the free mini-adventure Delores.