Occasionally a game pops along that embraces an atmosphere that really gets you engrossed and lost in its world. Often we talk about immersion and detail in the same turn. Enter Jazzpunk – one of the most stupidly silly games to grace my screen in a good while where the detail is in the amount of jokes crammed into its episodes – not the detail of the world around you.
Jazzpunk throws you into an assault on the Kremlin in a tale of espionage and pigeons. It’s akin to a first person point and click adventure where you are given little clue as to how to advance through the episodes and therefore are left to explore what’s around you. It’s here where the game comes to life. Electrocute pigeons, find silly side quests down an alley, speak for witty comments from NPC’s such as the musician whom says “I have a few gigs coming up – maybe even a tetrabyte!” Yep – its facepalm silliness and tongue in cheek humour all the way. About half the characters have manly squeaking voices and talk utter dribble, other’s have dubious accents and it all makes you smile. Right from the off you are asked if you have the McGuffin. How they made that word sound so saucy and silly I’ve no idea.
Aside from the great cramming of humour that almost always connects perfectly, you have some interesting puzzles and mini games. Check out the space invaders game inside a microscope. There’s a fighting parody game too among others. However, if you took the crazy graphics and humour away the puzzles and gameplay would still stand up on their own. I genuinely wandered around trying to work out the right order to do many a thing and with little to no hand holding at all, you really do end up trying all kinds of ways to get through puzzles. Yes, that means you can come a bit stuck on occasion but because the areas are large enough to explore, but not large enough to feel lost and overwhelmed, it feels fine to recount your steps a few times. It also means that if you do complete the episodes, you get a real feeling of achievement. I won’t go into the jokes and story beyond saying that all is fantastic and to know more and expect more will only detract from the experience – so I’m staying quiet!
If I were to be a bit critical of the game, it would be purely that I had initially a couple of crashes to desktop in the opening area but no problems after that and that because it’s so colourful, when you get a bit carried away running around fast, it made me feel a little motion sick. It’s been a reason I struggle with FPS as a genre and sadly it rears its head here – but after a short rest, I’m always back in to see what lies next.
Positives
~ Genuinely funny and entertaining
~ No hand holding in its point n click style gameplay and puzzles
~ Excellent theme and graphical presentation
Negatives
~ Made me motion sick at times when I got over excited!
Conclusion
Deserves to be mentioned along with the more unique experiences of the PC gaming scene as a quirky, comedic adventure that’s good for an audience of Stanley Parable and Portal as it is for Monkey Island.