Jack Keane Review (PC)

I may be slightly biased towards the adventure game genre, so it’s no surprise that I volunteered to give developer Deck 13’s latest outing a visit. We tried out the preview code back in November and while it looked to have potential, it was only fair to overlook the odd bug and choppy frame rate. Now I’m tasked with writing essentially the same information again, but in a new way and without a doubt the greatest part of it will be telling you what’s wrong with the game.

Jack Keane remains in essence a standard point and click adventure game where you’ll be picking up as many items as possible from your surroundings and combining them together to form a new item that will solve one of the many problems facing Captain Jack. (Sure I’ve heard that one before; with Sparrow, Shepherd and Bauer all littering our pop culture, what’s the betting that the name shoots up the baby names popularity charts?)

Reinventing the wheel turning puzzle

The majority of modern adventures have tried in their own way to stamp their own mark onto the genre, with the Broken Sword series degrading into a string of crate moving and action based puzzles and Fahrenheit taking gesture based actions to the extreme. It is nice to see that Jack Keane uses pretty modern graphics technology (shimmering reflective water and occasional depth of field effects) and keeps the puzzles at the forefront of the product. The only trouble being that at the highest settings, the frame rate can dip quite low, and shudder to a halt on older systems; perhaps the kind that fans of the genre tend to deem suitable. But then, they can just turn the settings down, can’t they?

Colourful and vibrant, the areas you’ll be exploring consist of a large number of exciting locations and while the story is a little juvenile at points, there’s plenty to sink your teeth in to if you’re basically there for the puzzles. Herein lies the first dip in potential, and one that was never realistically going to be altered from the preview. The puzzles are generally sane, but have a tendency to allow you to experiment with items and achieve something that you’re not really sure you’re even trying to do.

The fun bit…

Even when you’re sure what you have to do, there are moments when your gaming conscience clicks in and tells you that having to kill a monkey isn’t quite what you signed up for. When you attempt the monkeycide and it fails, but achieves your objective anyway, you breathe a sigh of relief, but still, ignore GTA4; Jack Thompson will be having a go at this.

Equally, sometimes the puzzles don’t follow the apparent rules of the world, when you trap a snake with a grate that seems large enough for it to slip through. Don’t even get me started on when you have to empty a jam jar, and spend time finding someone that will eat the jam. That’s just a few moments though, and the rest of the time you’ll be satisfied to succeed in a way that only adventure gamers can understand. In general, this incredibly important side of the game is fine.

It’s a talkie

Since CD storage and therefore voice acting became prevalent in this most questioned of genre, the acting has been of a varied standard. Who can forget the brilliance of Grim Fandango’s performances? Not I, when faced with Jack Keane’s stylised but seemingly un-directed band of characters. To say that the acting is hammy is an understatement of about 10 pigs. Doctor T sounds like he’s just a shrubbery away from saying ‘Ni’, while Keane himself sounds remarkably American for an apparent Brit and everyone else is given probably the most stereotypical English or Indian accent possible.

Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, setting the tone and silliness of the game (and pushing down its intended audience by a decade), but it seems like the actors weren’t properly directed, with mistakes in the intonation present occasionally.

“I bet you haven’t seen anything but water for a long time.” Jokes another captain.

“No I haven’t!” defensively exclaims Jack.

Some dialogue (not through the fault of the acting) even ignores puzzles you’ve solved, for example talking to guards once you’ve solved the puzzle to be allowed through still has the dialogue option to try and persuade them to let you through. The occasional word is different from the subtitles too, which could have been spotted and solved (along with the few bugs) with a little testing, or a single play through.

Those extra little bonuses

As will be familiar to the majority who have already played many games in the genre, about a third of the way through the game you’ll get control of another character; Amanda, a spunky (why do I always feel naughty when using that word) addition to your crew, tagging along to go to a job interview on ‘the island’. It’s fun to give you a break from your standard and slightly repetitive (get paid, and leave the island) objectives that plague the start of the game, especially when some of them conflict with Jack’s own.

It is the breaking up of the game into 13 chapters that necessitates them being relatively short with a more limited amount of areas in each one to keep the game from becoming a mammoth slog, and generally it works well to remain achievable without too many moments of being absolutely stumped. That said, there are still a few red herrings scattered around to keep you guessing, though the usual hassle of pixel hunting is also avoided when you find that the x button on your keyboard will display hotspots. Unfortunately, when discovered, it becomes the standard way of exploring each locale, rather than a helpful hint system for if you’re stuck.

Breakout points

I was pleasantly surprised when taking a look at the preview code that there are secret puzzles, and alternate objectives and routes in some areas of the game to encourage replays; a factor sadly missing in most adventure games. One of the main benefits was that if you solved ‘bonus’ puzzles, some of which are as simple as finding all of the starfish on a beach, and some more object oriented like fixing both problems with a boat rather than just the bare minimum to allow it to sail, you would unlock bonus features from the main menu. Unfortunately, with the final code it seems that this hasn’t been used to its full capacity simply giving you a museum to visit with gradually unlockable ‘waxworks’ of some characters, letting you hear some of their lines again. There is also a feature to unlock that lets you put a sepia tone over the graphics, but it is generally quite pointless, since you’ll miss the vibrancy of the mise-en-scène.

Again, a feature that is touted impressively then lets down over the course of the game is the animation and general cinematics. While the majority of the lip sync is decent, the first puzzle has you breaking out of a chair and thrusts you into a cinematic that shows imaginative and effective animation and visual flair. This does not continue throughout the game, only offering a couple of comparable moments later on. It is a shame to see something that sets the exciting cartoon feeling not being consistant throughout the game, but only disappointed me because it was so early on that it set my hopes from the start.

Overall, Jack Keane remains an entertaining youthful if slightly buggy adventure. It’ll give fans of the genre plenty of new puzzles to sink their teeth in to, but won’t entice newcomers unless they’re of the younger generation and haven’t had the pleasure of some of the more polished adventure titles.

I wonder whether LucasArts have all but departed adventures because of the prolification of the internet; after all, what’s the point in creating a mammoth game if an audience doesn’t have the willpower to avoid google-ing a walkthrough if they get stuck for more than five minutes? As ever, to enjoy a game like Jack Keane, you’ll need to have the drive and determination to solve the puzzles on your own. If not, I hear there’s an action game set in Liberty City coming out later this month.