Monkey Island creator's new RPG is "best described as Classic Zelda meets Diablo meets Thimbleweed Park"
No title yet, due late 2024 or 2025
Genuinely legendary game designer Ron Gilbert – whose works include the classic adventure game Monkey Island, the RTS Total Annihilation (as producer), and the term “cutscenes” – is making a new game.
The Terrible Toybox website describes it as “Classic Zelda meets Diablo meets Thimbleweed Park”, and one of the other people working on it is Elissa Black, co-designer and writer of the wonderful Objects In Space… who is also, I’ve just learned from her personal website, working on a retro 90s style turn-based spaceship command game influenced by the 1971 mainframe adaptation of Star Trek. Argh, so many good things in one article.
There’s little more to say about the new Zelda-meets-Thimbleweed-meets-Diablo game, other than that it’s been in development since the start of this year, and is "coming late 2024 (or maybe early 2025, this is gamedev after all)." According to Gilbert, having Black on the team “ups the chance by 37% that I'll finish the game before becoming bored and disillusioned”.
We also have a smattering of screens to look over, including a village area with a bakery and weapon shop, which certainly whiff of Zelda. I bet that statue of the sword-wielding hero has a sunken staircase beneath it.
Looks like there's a day-night cycle, too, with enemies including walking skeletons, but can we defeat them with insult swordfighting? The big house with the well nearby is seemingly "a city hall where both justice and bureaucracy can be served," as Gilbert explains on Mastodon. "Increase your bureaucracy stat to get more paperwork done." Hopefully the game does indeed have a bureaucracy stat. I've been disappointed, I must admit, by how little paperwork there is to do in Zelda, given how many laws Link must surely break while invading houses and smashing pots for rupees.
Thanks to Time Extension for lobbing the news our way and to Newswriter King Banana Nic Reuben for snatching it out of the air and stuffing it into the Maw.