A very young inspector calls for a mysterious adventure
Remember poring over those choose-your-own-adventure books, before videogames turned your brain to pixels? Well this visualy striking episodic adventure is here to remind you exactly how all those nail-biting decisions felt.
Jenny LeClue is a young detective on a quest to prove her mother 's innocence in a murder investigation, in the seemingly idyllic town of Arthurton Dark already, isn't it? Every decision you make counts, and to make things even more meta, Jenny has a narrator called Arthur К Finklestein, who lets you write and alter the story as you go.
"Growing up choose-your-own-adventure books were the first kind of fiction that really got me excited about reading." explains game director Joe Russ "They were awesome, and different from most books and you felt like you had some ownership of the story. Inspired by that idea of authorship and ownership in narrative, we are attempting to craft a layered meta-narrative The way we're currently experimenting with player choice on a social or global scale is fun to play with and interesting for us as the players have influence on the direction that the next part of the story is written in."
Mografi will actually be tallying the choices made by the whole player-base in each episode, and letting that affect the next instalment. The way players choose to approach episode one's promised cliffhanger ending, for example, will have an influence on how the following chapter begins
Analyse this
Arthurton is filled with interesting townsfolk to talk to, and the development team is focusing hard on building an array of realistic characters and relationships. Despite its young hero, the game is for all ages and the characters are key in proving that this is the case "One of our goals with writing Jenny, the author, and the other core characters is to make them interesting, complex, and sometimes contradictory. I think that’s something we can all relate to as part of the human condition," says Russ.
”I think there can and should be more games with compelling stories and characters perhaps with more complex or unique motivations. We are also very interested in exploring the ideas of authorship and ownership in storytelling, in this case between Jenny, the author, the player, and the community."
As well as being a dab-hand at solving puzzles, one of young Jenny's talents is analysing characters during dialogue sequences. Sherlock Holmes-style. you can rotate the camera to hone in on certain suspicious clues, such as a tell that might indicate they’re lying to you. And possibly with slightly more subtlety than in LA Noire..
"We’re still building and testing the mechanic, and it’s one I’m very excited about.” enthuses Russ. "It’s an idea we're exploring as a response to the age-old text dialogue that started in RPGs, and is now the main mechanic in visual novel games like Professor Layton. I really like these games, but sometimes it can become quite frustrating when your only interactive choice is to advance to the next piece of inevitable text, and at times I felt trapped. For me this is a chance to try to evolve that language and hopefully give the players a greater sense of freedom in those critical story moments between two characters."
Draw footage
The adventure is ultra-easy on the eyeballs, with a strikingly gorgeous art style that, Russ says, is inspired as much by cinema as by other videogames. "I love the visual language that Wes Anderson and DP David Yeoman have created in their films. It's this very graphic, rectilinear symmetry that I find very beautiful," he says. "I want to make Jenny's world feel graphic, and crisp, but also with a strong sense of mood and atmosphere. I'm also heavily influenced by the kind of atmospheric approach that David Lynch created in films like Mulholland Drive. Blue Velvet, and Lost Highway."
A point-and-dick adventure with a hint of Lynch is a disturbingly cool prospect, but films aren't the only thing Russ has had in mind while shaping Jenny LeClue. "I have a ton of inspirations and influences, from animation (Memories, Iron Giant, Gravity Falls), to TV (Nurse Jackie, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Boardwalk Empire, Lost) and other games (Silent Hill, Broken Age, Alan Wake, Alien: Isolation Professor Layton, Ghost Trick, Resident Evil)," he explains. An impressive list that makes us realise we'd pay good money to see a Professor Layton/Alien: Isolation crossover.
Plus, while plenty of point-and-clicks are often packed with tenuous and frustrating puzzles. Jenny LeClue thankfully won't have you heading to Google to find the solutions. "The compelling part of adventure games for me is the engrossing characters and story world which they inhabit. For me, overly complex puzzles can become a roadblock to the flow of the narrative," explains Russ. "We want to focus more on the narrative aspect Including characterization, atmosphere and storytelling rather than clever puzzles or challenges of skill. "
Jenny LeClue looks like it'll be a dark delight to settle down with when the first episode is released this winter. Move over. True Detective?