I'm fascinated with the Jack The Ripper legend and I'm always happy to see any new takes on the story and this one has a very different take on the whole affair. The other thing that intrigued me was the added element of the Arthurian legend to the mix, which seemed strange at first but it definitely makes things more interesting. I was hoping to like this game a lot and I did in many ways, but it is let down in many other ways.
The writing is top notch and the voice acting is excellent, I can't fault any of the cast members of this game. If you're looking for an interesting story to unweave with some great actors then you won't do any wrong with this game. But unfortunately, it does have its issues.
The developers originally launched a Kickstarter to fund the game but it ultimately failed, but they went ahead with making the game anyway. Despite the game being on a tight budget, which does show in places, the end result is still impressive. The graphics are a mix of 3D models and hand-drawn 2D graphics, it doesn't really detract from the game but it shows that they didn't have the time or budget to fully commit to 3D. It doesn't detract from the game too much and graphics aren't what I look for with adventure games, but it does look a little out of place at times. The 3D character models for the main cast of characters are still pretty good quality though.
The worst thing that I can say about this game is that it's clunky and unpolished, despite this game already having an overhaul once they sold enough copies to be able to afford to put more time into the game. Walking around is slow, the characters turning around is painful to watch and the pathfinding can be a little wild at times. There are only a handful of environments where you need to walk around in and only one of them is of any significant size, but still, when walking around is your only way of travelling around it is a little tiresome. You can double quick to make the character you're controlling at the time to walk at double speed but there isn't any fast travel system. There are a number of small areas that you are only in the once, which makes the whole walking and turning thing even more painful and it gets worse if another 3D model is in the room. You are able to push 3D character models across the map if you clip them correctly, if it's a secondary character that you can switch between then you just get caught on them and you have to navigate your way out of it like two ships trying to move out of each others path.
There are a couple of mini-games, one which you only see twice more after the starting area and another that you learn halfway through the game and only use one afterwards. They do fit within the logic and mechanics of the game somewhat, although the first one lacks a tutorial or any tooltips, thankfully I managed to work around it by figuring out that red = bad and gold = good.
The main issue that I have with the game is that you aren't able to save the game manually. I have no idea why an adventure game would even consider being released in TYOOL 2019 that would neglect to have this function but they have done just that.
Despite the clunkiness of the game, I enjoyed my experience. Even though the story is linear and the ending remains the same regardless, there are different decisions and other dialogue choices that you can make which will affect how it plays throughout. All in all, it took me ten hours to complete and I will come back and replay it again one day in the future.
tl;dr 10/10 A dog picks up a pen in it's mouth and draws a picture of a penis.
