Terrible Toybox’s pixellated paranormal point-and-click adventure game Thimbleweed Park, released earlier this year, unfolds like a comedic X-Files; as always, it begins with a dead body.

The game has the look at feel of a classic Lucasarts adventure, and it also has the pedigree: among its creators are Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick, who brought us classics like Maniac Mansion and Zack McKracken and the Monkey Island series. But Terrible Toybox also features indie devs like Jenn Sandercock. “Our team isn’t just Lucasfilm alumni, there’s people like me on the team who are relatively newer to the industry,” she says.

I talked to Sandercock about what made Thimbleweed stand out from the crowd in an indie field saturated by nostalgia.

What makes us different to many games that are “inspired by” or “in homage” to classic games is that our core team is made up of people who actually created those classic games. So they know all the things that they learnt previously and have had time to think about ways to fix any issues they perceived in the way they used to make games. Also, I’m sure having fans come up to them over the years saying things like: “I loved X, but that one puzzle was so frustrating” helps a lot.

“Many old games were frustrating because of design mistakes, not the actual core gameplay mechanics. We can make a new adventure game using the old mechanics in a way that doesn’t feel frustrating.”

What I and the others bring to the team is a fresh perspective. I grew up playing adventure games and loved them a lot (it’s why I got into the industry). Based on that experience there were a number of pet peeves that I wanted to “fix”. For example, in Thimbleweed Park at the edge of the screen the cursor changes to show an arrow if there’s another area you can explore at the side of the screen, whether that’s via side scrolling or going to a new room. And that’s because there was one game where I got stuck because I didn’t even realize there was another room I could explore. 

Other little things that we’ve included are: dynamic lighting, fast walking, full voice acting, casual mode, a hint-line system, following your cursor around. None of those things seem very big when taken by themselves, but when you put it together it modernizes the game and makes it easy for people to jump in and play regardless of whether they are veteran point-and-click adventure gamers or new to the genre.

It can be slightly frustrating to me sometimes when Thimbleweed Park is dismissed as simply a throwback game that only hard-core point-and-click adventure gamers will love. First person shooters have tweaked their gameplay quite a lot over the years, but a lot of the core gameplay is pretty much the same. It feels frustrating that for adventure games people don’t separate out content or implementation issues from the core gameplay mechanics.

Many of the old games were frustrating, but in my opinion that wasn’t because of the actual core gameplay mechanics, it was because of game design mistakes. So if we use our knowledge from over the years, we can make a new adventure game using the old mechanics, but that doesn’t feel frustrating.

“Thimbleweed Park was somewhat an experiment to try and work out what it was that made those games charming, since we weren’t sure what component it was. We kept many of the same mechanics, and modernized where we thought it was necessary or improved the game. “

For us, Thimbleweed Park was somewhat an experiment to try and work out what it was that made those games charming since we weren’t sure what component it was. 

So we kept many of the same mechanics, modernized where we thought it was necessary or improved the game. Of course, I’m a little biased, but I think we really did manage to capture a bit of the charm. I feel that we’ve made point-and-click adventure games accessible to people who’ve never played them before as well as people who never stopped playing them.

Developing a game is difficult, and it’s hard to find time to put in all the features we want. For example, I really wanted to put in some sort of hint system, since I don’t like walkthroughs that spoil the game. However, during development we ran out of time to work out how to integrate a hint system into the fiction of the game and not make it too jarring to players.

After release, Meghann O’Neill wrote an incremental hint system that reminded me of the old UHS (Universal Hint System) style hints. We liked it so much that I worked with Meghann to put it into the game as a phone number that you can call within the game, a hint line. In hindsight, it feels like an obvious way to implement hints, since the game is set in 1987 when adventure games did have hint lines where you could call and talk to a real person to find out what to do next. But during development, we just couldn’t have taken the time to work on this. So it feels great that now anyone who’s downloaded it can get this update for free. You couldn’t do that for games on physical disks back in the day.

“When we were designing puzzles, we always came at it from a story perspective first. By integrating the puzzle solving with the narrative, it means that players themselves progress the story.”

When we were designing puzzles, we always came at it from a story perspective first. We knew what we wanted to accomplish and then we’d work out how someone in the real world might solve that puzzle and try to see if that makes sense within our game world. By integrating the puzzle solving with the narrative, it means that players themselves progress the story. It’s kind of like the show, don’t tell method, but is “do, don’t tell” instead. Players feel a lot more ownership when they get to play a real part in the story themselves.

I feel that many contemporary adventure games have moved away from puzzle solving and have concentrated on the narrative/story part of the game. I was a little late to get around to “finishing” it, but I loved playing the Witness. Games like that and the Professor Layton series feel like their core puzzle solving mechanics are very separated from the underlying narrative that goes through the game. Although I love the puzzles, they’re what I solve to get a cutscene, rather than advancing the narrative by my puzzle solving. Other adventure games these days have very little in the way of traditional puzzles at all, such as Gone Home and Firewatch.

I think that this evolution of adventure games is great. It’s wonderful to see people taking the genre in different directions. However, I believe that rather than us deciding there is only one “good” way to do an adventure game, these different approaches are simply adding to the breadth of types of adventure games that are possible.

Nine years after introducing the world to Mario (under the guise of “Jumpman”) in Donkey Kong, Nintendo created a companion for him: Super Mario World’s Yoshi. But where did Yoshi come from?

According to excerpts translated by Kotaku of a new Nintendo [Japanese] interview with devs who worked on Super Mario World and Yoshi’s Island, Yoshi was inspired by an image of Mario riding a horse that Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto drew in the ’80s.

(The interview also included a screenshot [excerpted below] of a prototype Yoshi sprite, dated November of 1989, in which the iconic dinosaur looks more like a sad turtle.)

“When we were making [Super Mario Bros. 3], he drew a picture of Mario riding a horse and had put it up on wall next to where he sits. When I saw that, I thought, ‘I guess he wants Mario to ride something,'” Super Mario World director (and fellow Nintendo vet) Takashi Tezuka reportedly said. “So, when we were making Super Mario World, we had this ‘dinosaur land’ concept, and I had [Shigefumi] Hino draw reptile type art.”

However, it sounds like one of Hino’s first attempts came out looking more like a crocodile than everyone was comfortable with. Tezuka reportedly felt that was maybe a little too reptile-y, and sketched a cuter dinosaur-like creature that became the basis for the Yoshi that appeared in Super Mario World.

And of course, according to a company character guide published in ’93 and publicized by Console Wars author Blake Harris in 2014, Yoshi’s full name isn’t Yoshi: it’s T. Yoshisaur Munchakoopas.

Hello dear friends,

The day is finally here and Cuphead has arrived! You can get the all-cartoon magical wondergame on Xbox One and Windows 10 as an Xbox Play Anywhere title (buy once to play on both console and PC), or you can find it on Steam and GOG — whichever you’d prefer! We are a mixed bag of emotions to be able to bring you something we only dreamt of creating since we were kids.

Cuphead is a side-scrolling action platformer with a heavy focus on boss battles. Traverse the interactive overworlds to help Cuphead and Mugman repay their debt to the devil on a bet they shouldn’t have made. This game was hand crafted using painstaking methods straight from the golden age of animation to capture the aesthetic of classic Disney and Fleischer Studios cartoons.

Each and every single frame of animation was drawn on paper with pencil, then inked on paper. The backgrounds are all original watercolor paintings and the custom jazz soundtrack is the cherry on the cake! We were heavily inspired by retro games from the late 1980s – early 1990s, so expect a fair challenge and relish in the victories you’ll make! Enjoy in single-player mode or local co-operative play.

Above all, we hope you simply have fun with Cuphead!