Ron Gilbert says that puzzles will be the focus of his retro adventure game Thimbleweed Park, and it turns out that one of those puzzles involves a phone and a bunch of answerphone messages. Thanks to a comment on Kickstarter, you can soon leave Gilbert a voice recording that could show up in the game, presumably as a fun easter egg when players get the puzzle wrong.
Here's Gilbert explaining how the puzzle came to be.
"One of the Kickstarter reward tiers was to appear in the Thimbleweed Park phonebook. During the Kickstarter, someone in the comments suggested that it would be neat if they could also record a voicemail message. Not being above stealing a good idea, we quickly added that and pretended we thought of it all along.
"We've delayed [gathering] all the names and voicemail messages because we wanted to make sure we were getting all the right information. We've implemented the phonebook and puzzle with dummy information and now we're ready to start gathering names and voicemail recordings."
Understandably, Gilbert and co. want people to test the voicemail system first, before the website goes live in mid-January. You can sign this form now to help do that, but be aware that you'll probably need to re-record your message when the time comes, as "any information submitted during the test will not be used in the game".
You can test the voicemail system whether you were a Kickstarter backer or not, though it's not clear whether the same will be true of the website, when that launches in January.
