In the first day or two after completing each game, which one did you feel more satisfied by overall?
- Thimbleweed Park
- Return To Monkey Island
0 voters
I like the Thimbleweed Park ending more than a lot of people. For me, it wasn’t about “the world isn’t real”; it was about how each of your characters responded to the world being not real. Reyes needing to prove his father’s innocence, despite everything being fiction (and his father possibly never existing because we don’t even see him in the game), was a beautiful moment to me.
Still on Part 4 of MI6.
At the risk of being a broken record, my favorite is still The Cave. You know… that game that ends when the owner gives you a key to lock up, and you go through the beginning of the game section as things are shutting down, but then you have to decide whether to take your object of desire or leave it behind? That ending. 
Hard to say because RtMI ending was more emotional, but the difficulty level easier, so you don’t get stuck long enough that it sticks with you…
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For me it was definitely Thimbleweed Park. As I mentioned a little in our RTMI ending discussion, the reveal for the ending of TP came organically as an entrance into a true final act. That information built into the climax and was still very satisfactory for me in a way that RTMI wasn’t (abrupt, felt like it halted the build to a climax I was still journeying towards).
But for me it’s not even about the ending. I absolutely enjoyed both games, but Thimbleweed Park felt more fulfilling to me in pretty much all ways. I thought the puzzles were better put together and more interesting. It felt like there was more to discover and to juggle, as I would get bits and pieces of different puzzles or story threads that I needed to remember and then expand on once the time was right or once I had discovered some more. In RTMI, it was a lot more of just “do this, now do this, now do this” in the way it was organized(except for the very well put together 4th act).
I also liked the Thimbleweed story and characters more in general, found the conversations more amusing, and I feel like I laughed or thought “oh, I love this detail” way more.
When I finished Thimbleweed, I thought “boy, I cannot wait to play that again.” With RTMI, I had fun for most of the time I played it, but there is no drive in me to play it again anytime soon.
With Thimbleweed Park I was kind of hoping for more games in that world if they could work it out (and we got Delores!). For RTMI, when this finished instead of wanting more Monkey Island, I was thinking instead about the Maniac Mansion remake idea—hoping that if the Disney relationship was good they could expand on that game and world if they could resist the urge the do a complete 4th wall eviscerating ending yet again.
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I went with TWP, but it’s close…
RtMI had the benefit of being in a pirate setting and having very strong established characters, so in those ways I preferred it to TWP (I’m not a big fan of the sort of genre TWP is set in, but that’s not the game’s fault, just a personal preference).
The TWP art stuck with me a lot more and created a more atmospheric vibe, the only thing I wasn’t keen on were the bobble-heads. I think RtMI’s art is fine, but creates a different mood, especially with how fast Guybrush could walk, it made it more like an episode of Dexter’s Laboratory at times.
The humour was about equal for me, there were laugh-out-loud moments in both, but both also had parts that felt a bit underwritten, the early games like MI, MI2, Curse had more consistent humour.
Puzzles seemed more “classic” in TWP and seemed to take more time, and that kept me in the game’s world longer and so made it more memorable overall. There’s a lot of things in RtMI that I can’t really recall, even though I only just played it recently.
Both had odd areas where you just strolled through with nothing to really do/interact with, like the path to the maze on Terror Island in RtMI, and the graveyard in TWP. Both also rushed towards their end in the final part - I know Ron likes to pick up the pace at the end, but it seemed sort of unfinished/rushed in both games.
The ending to TWP felt more well developed and executed than the one in RtMI, and because TWP was a one-off self-contained game it also worked better for me as a kind of interesting short story. RtMI’s ending, for me, felt a bit of a mess that creates problems for how the overall series works.
Weirdly, I actually enjoyed the Delores mini-game more than both, that was somehow really satisfying to me.
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I finally finished Return. My opinion hasn’t changed much; I still see it as a middle performer.
I slightly preferred Thimbleweed’s ending because it read like: “If you discovered that nothing in your world mattered, then what would still be important to you?”
For me, Return’s ending carried messages that don’t resonate with me very much, like “unfinished business” and “you can’t go back home”.
Well, it’s hard for me to follow the rationale for “unfinished business” because Ron told us he never had any ideas for Monkey Island 3a. And the concept of “you can’t go back home” has always been laughable to me because, metaphorically speaking, I go back home all the time.
EDIT: Hey, maybe it’s because I never achieved anything big like Ron or Dave when I was younger! 
Maybe you need to have already done something great in order to expect to do more great things, and have unfinished business.
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I voted TWP for one simple reason.
It’s harder. The puzzles were harder and made me bang my head on walls multiple times. And that’s what I want from an adventure game.
Apart from that, it’s like asking me which of my two daughters is more beautiful.
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I did not vote, I don’t have a choice. Both equally have satisfied me.
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As a game, I would have voted Thimbleweed Park. I voted for Return to Monkey Island, though, because for me it was a very emotional finale of a thirty years long story.
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