There were times in Jenny LeClue – Detectivu where I was pretty frustrated but it was hard to stay mad at the game. At it’s core it has a lot of charm and is just very likeable. The characters have depth and humour; the town has history and class; the world has a brightness and great art design to it. The music was enjoyable although a bit repetitive. The puzzles are a very mixed bag and the game has some technical warts but nothing that is game breaking. The game consists of using the keyboard to move Jenny along in a side scroller manner and solving various puzzles to progress the story. You get the option to choose various dialogue responses in between the puzzles. You also get to interrogate various people by having to notice certain clues on their person and then using those clues to form a correct hypothesis about whatever you suspect them of. Many of the puzzles are very easy and just overly apparent what you have to do to solve them but there were these radio wave puzzles where you have to adjust a variety of dials and switches to just the right combination to hear the message or see the video, I found these very annoying. It would have been better had the dial or switch locked in when it was in the right spot so that I wasn’t constantly readjusting them. There were two puzzles that stood out to me as better examples of what the game had to offer and that was the graveyard puzzle where you have to find the correct grave to search by deducing which of them were tallest based on their statements and the vending machine puzzle where you had to not only figure out the code to purchase an item but also which buttons to press as all of them were linked to a different character than it said. Both of those required you to think and use logic but neither had the annoying fiddling that the radio wave puzzle had. There were a variety of mini games you do in order to proceed past certain points such as picking locks and breaking wooden barricades. Both were simple but gave some variety to the game play. The lock picks just required you to find the correct places to hit the tumblers and the barricades just required you to find the cracks on each plank of wood. The story was really well done and had a good amount of twists. It also did a good job of using the stories author as a narrator and I found many of his comments about Jenny’s escapades to be pretty funny. The game ends on a cliffhanger which annoyed many people but I didn’t mind it. I won’t let the last few minutes of a game ruin the previous many hours of enjoyment I had.
I played Jenny LeClue – Detectivu on Linux. It never crashed on me and I didn’t encounter any bugs. I played version 1.0.15(2) of the game. There was only one graphics option to choose besides your resolution. Alt-Tab didn’t work. The game used the Unity engine. You can’t manually save the game. The game auto saves at checkpoints and there is only one save slot that gets overwritten each time. While this is less than ideal one thing I did like was that the game tells you how many minutes ago it last saved in case you forgot. It does display a saving logo as well when it occurs. One strange decision the game made was to only use the keyboard. Your mouse can’t be used to control jenny; click on objects; or to browse the menus. In this day and age that is just strange for a PC game to not have mouse support. I don’t feel that it hindered the game too much but at the very least mouse support on the menus would have been appreciated. While I wasn’t able to log frame rate in this game I didn’t notice any lag at all on the high setting, it was always smooth.
Disk Space Used: 1.8 GB
VRAM Used: 558-755 MB
CPU Usage: 3-6 %
RAM Usage: 2-2.6 GB
Graphics Setting Used: High @ 1920*1080
One game that comes to mind to compare Jenny Leclue to is Oxenfree in that it is a dialogue heavy puzzle game. Overall the bad puzzles; auto saves and lack of mouse support didn’t overshadow the rest of the games positives. I adored the characters; the town; the story; the humour and the dialogue. I finished my first play through in 10 hours and 2 minutes. I paid $24.99 CAD for the game and feel that is about right for what you get although on the high end of that spectrum.
My Score: 7/10
My System:
AMD Ryzen 5 2600X | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | MSI RX 5700 XT Gaming X 8GB | Mesa 20.0.6 | Samsung 970 Evo Plus 500GB | Manjaro 20.0.1 | Mate 1.24 | Kernel 5.6.11-1-MANJARO