Ron Gilbert, famed for his work on classic adventures including Monkey Island, Maniac Mansion, Zak McKracken, and more recently Thimbleweed Park, is getting up to something new and that looks to be quite different from his past work. It doesn’t have a name yet, but it’s described on Gilbert’s Terrible Toybox website as “classic Zelda meets Diablo meets Thimbleweed Park.”
Gilbert’s been posting about his new game on Mastodon (via Time Extension) since early 2024, but it’s gone largely unnoticed until just recently. In February, he shared an image of a whiteboard rough-out of the opening area and quests, and a little bit of stats work; from there, he’s posted a few more in-progress images, along with some brief thoughts about his process.
“I have been working on it for a year or so,” Gilbert told PC Gamer. “Like a lot of early prototypes, the game has slowly morphed into what it is now. I recently hired an artist and that really got things moving. I suck at art. It’s the game I always wanted to play and I got tired of waiting so I decided to build it.”
He also announced last week that Elissa Black, co-founder of Objects in Space studio Flat Earth Games, has joined the project as a quest designer. “This ups the chance by 37% that I’ll finish the game before becoming bored and disillusioned,” Gilbert wrote.
Despite that pessimistic note, Gilbert’s new game appears to be coming along well, although there’s no sign of a release date at this point: The Terrible Toybox website says the new game will be out in late 2024, “or maybe early 2025, this is gamedev after all.”