Thimbleweed Park: A new classic point & click adventure

Every adventure game I've worked on has had the "one puzzle". The one that drives you crazy because you know the end result, but you don't know how to get there. You try everything and it all seems too obscure, or worse, too arbitrary. You like the core puzzle, you like the objects it uses, but you just can't seem to make it work.

In Monkey Island, the rubber chicken with the pulley in the middle was one such puzzle. The player needed to get to Hook Island and the zipline felt like a good solution. There was something nice about that, but we just couldn't figure out a clever way for it to work. Maybe you could use a small piece of rope or cloth to slide along the line, but that was boring. We had the idea of a small pulley or something round like a pulley, but that was also boring.

I'm don't remember who came up with the rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle, it sounds very Steve Purcell, but it might have been Dave or Tim or Noah or any number of people we brainstormed with. I just don't remember. But, it was born out of pure frustration: "Screw it, just make it a rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle" and then we'd all laugh and there was a moment of silence where we all realized that was the solution. It was a puzzle solved with humor.