Maniac Mansion creators are making a 'true spiritual successor' called Thimbleweed Park

The creators of seminal 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 and others, like The Secret of Monkey Island. Their new game is called Thimbleweed Park.

Gilbert and Winnick are taking Thimbleweed Park to Kickstarter, hoping to raise $375,000 to create the retro-styled 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.

Thimbleweed Park will tell the tale of a pair of "washed-up detectives" who are called in to investigate a death 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. Some of the items shown in a gameplay video include a balloon animal, a can of tuna and what appears to be the chainsaw lifted straight 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.

Kickstarter backers can get a digital copy of the game for a $20 pledge. For $25, backers get a copy of the game and absolution of guilt for pirating Maniac Mansion in their youth. Higher tier rewards include a poster, a t-shirt, a physical collector's edition, a one-off Thimbleweed Park plushie and more.

Thimbleweed Park is being developed for Linux, Mac and Windows PC, and has an estimated release of June 2016.