Going into this review, I have to admit, I met Jack Keane with some skepticism. A point-and-click adventure game in 3-D, the game claims to be inspired by the LucasArts tales of old. Gamers of the 1990s will have many fond memories of those games, with their engaging characters, fantastic writing delivered by excellent voice actors, and uniquely creative worlds. This new title, from Deck 13 and 10TACLE Studios, stars a roguish, success-through-bumbling ship’s captain and a strong, confident love interest, set in the age of piracy, which may sound familiar — you’ll be hard-pressed to find a single review out there that doesn’t make the Monkey Island comparison. I gave the game’s smirking protagonist a chance, all the same; I decided to see if he could stand out from under Guybrush’s shadow, whether he really would help me recapture the nostalgic joy of adventure gaming, and whether or not his debut adventure was fun.
Short answer: Eh.
Though an adventure game may occasionally include the odd action sequence or mini-game, their primary draws are their characters and stories, and Jack Keane — while full of potential — is trying far too hard to be your friend, rather than just being engaging on his own. Jack, the protagonist, is supposed to be an irresponsible but lovable oaf, cynical and snarky, but instead, he comes off like that guy who just has to pitch in his two cents on everything, just to be heard. Jack is that guy — the one who thinks that everything he says is golden, and always wants to make sure you got the joke. On multiple occasions, the game starts to set up what could be a really funny moment, and then Jack knocks all the fun out of it by basically holding up a big arrow-shaped sign reading “THIS IS FUNNY.” Jack runs across a dilapidated temple, whose monks complain that they couldn’t get government funding despite having submitted a 50-page business plan. It’s a clever, tongue-in-cheek moment right up until Jack smugly declares, “Ha! You sound just like a disgruntled game programmer!” The absolute worst thing you can do to a joke is explain it while telling it, and Jack breaks this cardinal rule with wild abandon. Most of the time, you wish Jack would shut up and just let the funny events be funny, instead of trying to mug for the camera and interject his shallow wit into everything.
Jack Keane splits your gameplay time between two characters as its story unfolds: Jack, the guy with a leaky ship and a devil-may-care haircut, and Amanda, a fiery blonde with a trusty rifle (which, the game jokes, she’s obviously eager to use because she’s American). Both of them must ultimately foil the schemes of Dr. T, a not-all-there mad scientist with a speech impediment, who’s just a German accent away from screaming “Ve haff vays uff making you talk.” Dr. T has plans to do away with the tea plantations in India, which has prompted the British Empire to act swiftly in order to thwart him.
This is a funny plot device, and fits very well with the game’s overall motif; Jack Keane is very much a humor-centric game, much like some of its LucasArts predecessors. Unfortunately, as mentioned, the humor is a lot more miss than hit. Perhaps this is a problem of being lost in translation, perhaps not. It isn’t as though the game falls completely flat; there are definitely a few moments when the humor is used quite effectively. Jack makes a Lucas reference by insisting a British guard “doesn’t need to see his identification,” to which the man replies that not everyone in the Empire (the British Empire) is so easily swayed. “You shall not pass!” shouts a man holding a mop, the mop set in front of himself like a staff, the grey strands held near his face like a long beard. A stranded gentleman you meet in South Africa informs you that he has been the victim of a scam wherein he received a letter from the estate of a recently-deceased royal, and he offered the use of his bank account to transfer what he was promised would be a massive inheritance. Attempting to pick up an object when Jack is in the nude (following a wacky series of events, natch) will cause Jack to admonish the player, “Pockets don’t come with this suit.” There are visual gags as well — the ESRB rating is “T,” citing “partial nudity” as a descriptor, mostly involving the aforementioned “sneak of shame” and a dumpy British gentleman in a tiger-striped thong (which inspires a nearby mountain-climber to hurl himself off a cliff).
Unfortunately, these moments of genuine amusement are few and far between, hampered primarily by the unimpressive voice acting. There are a number of occasions where what might have been a serviceable joke is spoiled by a lackluster delivery. Jack is meant to have a smug or roguish character, but he frequently just comes across as bored or unconcerned. Amanda’s voice actress is far worse — you will find yourself wanting to skip quickly through her dialogue so as to avoid listening to her. As the game’s sole American character, you get the feeling the casting director found the first actress they could, and said, “Got an American dialect? Good, you’re hired.” It’s also readily apparent that there was little or no voice direction for Jack Keane. Jokes and dialogue stress the wrong words, make no vocal reference to just-delivered lines (”I eat goons like you for breakfast!” “You’re about to lose your breakfast!”), and otherwise suffer from a lack of context provided to the actors. “You sure startled me,” says Amanda calmly, without a hint of surprise in her voice. “It’s in me vest pocket,” says an NPC, his accent completely inappropriate for the dialect. Jack even tries to fall back on a ’90s-era “NOT!” joke, but with the delivery of the “comedy tutor” scene from Borat — only he’s not being deliberately obtuse for the fun of it, he’s just plain obtuse.
Overall, the audio is reasonable. The music is nothing spectacular, but it’s unobtrusive and appropriate to the setting. A bit of sound engineering here and there is used to clever effect; Jack’s lines take on a reverberant echo when he moves inside of a large cave, etc. The graphics, too, are decent but nothing special. The world of Jack Keane is a very cartoonish one, filled with bright colors, characters with exaggerated proportion, and humorously anachronistic props in a 19th century world. The game is not a next-gen graphical powerhouse — it’s no Crysis — but that’s not the point. Other recent adventure titles have made do with similar visual quality. An adventure game, ultimately, is about its puzzles. And, on this most crucial point, Jack Keane capsizes and sinks.
When a player consults a FAQ in order to solve a puzzle in a game, the result is typically one of two scenarios: In a well-designed game, the player will see the solution he missed, slap his forehead, and lament, “Of course! Why didn’t Ithink of that?” In a lesser game, the reaction usually involves a sigh and/or an eyeroll, and a grumbled “I don’t know how I was supposed to think of that.” Jack’s puzzles come in two varieties: Easy to the point of tedious, and downright ridiculous and counter-intuitive.
In instances of the former, you will wonder why the designer even bothered — the puzzles amount to zero-IQ fetch-quests in order to tack more time onto the game. Jack attempts to pick up a rare plant, only to have it slip through his fingers and off the balcony. Surely, the player thinks, now there will be a challenge to find where it landed, or recover it from an unwilling NPC. Nope — all Jack needs to do is walk the two screens down the stairs, where the plant is lying, and pick it up. No tricky solution, no damage to the plant, no cutscene triggered by being in the new location, nothing. There is literally no reason not to have just put the plant into Jack’s inventory the first time. On another occasion, Jack needs to recover a document from a local yokel, only to learn that he must actually get it from a different character, seven cross-scene jogs away (and a loading screen, which you must now travel across twice). Again, the second NPC doesn’t ask you to give him anything or do any favors, the game just felt like making you walk through a lot of scenery you’ve already seen several times by this point.
In cases of the latter, the puzzles seem utterly devoid of reason. Again, perhaps this is a problem in the translation; maybe in the original German, the dialogue has many more clues which were somehow omitted during the localization process. What it amounts to, though, is standing next to the puzzle du jour, and basically clicking every object you have on it until a solution appears, one so inconceivably illogical that the player feels no reward for having solved it through sheer trial and error. Well, obviously you’re supposed to cut a rope with an opened can (which makes no mention of being sharp upon examination). Of course you’re supposed to put the shilling in the shopping cart (which has made no mention of even having a coin slot). Naturally you should feed the wooden figurine to the meat-eating plant. When playing through this game, you will either need incredible patience, or you will need to consult a FAQ on a constant basis.
To top it all off, fully half the puzzles you can’t solve, you can’t solve because you couldn’t even find them. Jack Keane is a point-and-click adventure game, a genre which does not demand incredible technology or game engines. Yet, even at this, the game suffers from poor design. The game offers you a control option, where holding down the “X” key will superimpose a star over every clickable “hotspot” in the scene. The manual advises you that doing this may ruin some of the fun of the game, and this is completely the opposite of the truth. Jack Keane demands such pixel-perfect precision in selecting its on-screen objects that, even when you know what it is you’re trying to click, it’s possible to miss it completely. This is known to adventure and puzzle gamers as “pixel hunting,” and it isn’t any fun. On multiple occasions, what should be a perfectly obvious solution will pass the player by, simply because the player believes they’ve already checked the area and there was nothing there. It’s hugely irritating to check an FAQ and find that your only mistake was missing the 1 square micrometer hotspot. This is made even more frustrating when applied to moving objects; trying to click on the one usable leaf in a palm tree which is drifting in the wind, or the one necessary “climb up” hotspot on a turbulent plane, will frustrate players. Instead of moving forward, they’ll sigh and watch Jack race off into the background — where they’ve accidentally clicked instead — for the hundredth time.
Ultimately, this is the most noticeable symptom of the overall problem with Jack Keane: the game is sloppy. On the back of the box, the blurb promises that Jack will encounter “beauatiful women” (sic). Yes, it’s a simple typo that anyone could make, and an easily forgiven mistake. Now, imagine it repeated a thousand times over throughout the game, and suddenly a simple mistake starts to look like lazy design and a lack of polish. The game’s outer shell cracks in multiple places, showing you the mess underneath and pulling you out of the game world. Trying to use an item in your inventory will cause Jack to say, “I need to put it on the desk first,” long before the player knows there is any desk. Examining a clock says, “Two hands show the time,” long after the hands have been pried off and discarded in a different puzzle. “I’ve improvised [puzzle solution],” Jack says about an object he has not yet used, or in fact even picked up yet — he just sees the item in its normal state and declares its ultimate purpose. Jack, tied to a deathtrap, laments the loss of his prized pocketknife to free himself, while the game is in a closeup of his character model, which plainly still has the knife strapped to its belt.
There are even times when the errors are so blatant as to make one wonder if the game was tested at all. Jack Keane is buggy; it crashes on several occasions, and its lack of an auto-save feature will often cost you a lot of progress. Scrolling over an exit in the jungle gives the player the option to “Go to Then again, maybe I can scare it off somehow.” Amanda reads the description of an item when the player clicks a different object entirely. Jack starts a chapter of the game, inexplicably, with a tube of glue, which he didn’t have in the last scene, he is not shown getting in the current scene, never comes up in a puzzle and has no in-game use, and is just as inexplicably gone in the following chapter. Another exit to the jungle reads “Enter IACTOR VILLAGE JUNGLE LEAVETO CLIFF DESCNAME.” These are not small, out-of-the-way, bugs that you’d have to look hard to find or that players shouldn’t expect to see. Every one of the above instances happens front and center, occurring smack dab in the middle of the player’s intended path.
A game this sloppy is two things: It is disappointing, and it is insulting. Jack Keane disappoints because it could really be the game it wants to be, if it had only tried a little harder. Polish the bugs, hire a dialogue coach, drop in a few puzzle hints here and there, cut half of Jack’s lines, and you’d have a really competent and fun little game. Jack Keane insults because its flaws are so glaring and obvious. They are too numerous and blatant for the developer to have missed the overall quality level, but someone still signed off on it, and said, “This is good enough. They’ll play it anyway.” In truth, probably a few people will — people who are patient and forgiving enough to see that there’s some love for this game underneath the extremely rough exterior. But a review doesn’t get to judge a game on what it ought to be, a review judges the game that was produced, and the bugs are here, the puzzles and interface are frustrating, the characters fall flat, and the overall product is sub-par.
When Jack Keane landed on my desk, the first thing I noticed was the review quote they’d chosen to include on the box, from GameBoomers: “…This is Monkey Island done right, at last.” Let’s get one thing straight, GameBoomers and Jack Keane. You know what’s “Monkey Island done right?” Monkey freaking Island. The only way in which Jack Keane reminded me of Monkey Island is how much it made me wish I were playing that instead.
Tags: 10Tacle, Adventure, Deck 13, Jack Keane, PC, Point and Click, Review
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