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Jenny LeClue Detictivu (PC) artwork

Jenny LeClue Detictivu (PC) review


"Just a small town girl, living in a murder-y world."

From the writer of the “games that Flobknocker bought kinda close to each other on a whim and decided to do a series on them” trilogy, comes the spiritual successor to the review that started it all.

A couple of years ago, I reviewed Oxenfree - a gorgeous, 2d adventure game, released by a little indie studio, with great writing, snappy gameplay, and creepy conspiracy mystery elements. Now I’m reviewing Jenny Leclue (detectivú) a gorgeous, 2d adventure game, released by a little indie studio, with great writing, snappy gameplay, and creepy conspiracy mystery elements. I’m sensing a theme, here. When I first came across Jenny LeClue (detectivú) on Steam, it was hardly under the most auspicious of circumstances, and I added it to my wishlist for shamefully shallow reasons. It was Halloween, and my penchant for spooky games to play in the dark led me through Steam's writhing, filthy guts, where I claimed a few nice little titles, but ultimately found Jenny LeClue and wishlisted it. The reason for that wishlist addition extended no further than "oh my goodness, that looks so cute." See? Inscrutible professionalism, right there. So, naturally, either the Steam black Friday sale or the Christmas sale rolls on by, and I find there's a modest discount on the game and buy it immediately. And that's how we got here, talking about this little gem.

See, as much as I love me some meaningless cuteness, it's not going to stop me from picking apart a game's mechanics or performance, or any of the important stuff like that. Thankfully, though, I don't have to do very much of that here: Jenny Leclue is a rock solid experience throughout. First, I'd like to talk about those visuals. While I've played other truly gorgeous games, I found the artstyle in Jenny LeClue (detectivú) to have one of the most interesting and unusual looks I've yet seen. With slick, lineless art and sharp angles all over the place, the characters and world look reminiscent of Scooby-Doo Mystery Incorporated (maybe unavoidably, given Jenny's appearance and hobbies), mixed with Carmen Sandiego, all blended together with a thick coating of 50's googie and Hanna-Barbera cartoons. And that was far too many cartoon references in one line. Point is, Jenny LeClue looks good. With the downright funky artstyle they have, the tiny team at Mografi managed to create some lovely environments, from a dark and creepy graveyard, to a sun-soaked library in a quiet little all-American town, and even sinister laboratories. It's all really nice stuff, and then there's the characters themselves.



If I haven't made it abundantly clear yet, Jenny is utterly precious, and must be protected from the evils of the world at all costs. From the moment you reach the title screen, you’re greeted with the titular character’s adorable face, with different poses for the options in the main menu. Of course, the character designs don’t stop being great once you get into the game, with characters like Jenny’s mother looking believably weathered but kindly, Dean Strausberry as an immediately lovable, portly figure, and CJ’s sleep-deprived Doc Brown appearance. It’s all a delight to behold, and the characters are all supplied with a pleasant collection of animations to match, which range from general-purpose gestures and faces, to some specific reactions which seem to be unique. A pleasant sidenote is that the game’s art all seems to have either been made at 4K, or otherwise scales perfectly. Having subjected the game to a projector, I can say with certainty that the game looks stunning at higher resolutions.

So, given that it looks absolutely stunning, it would be remiss of me not to talk about the gameplay, which, thankfully, is almost as smooth sailing. For the most part, your interactions with the world come in the form of dialogue choices, a simple, but charming interrogation mechanic, searching the environment for doodads, puzzle solving, and hardcore sticker applying action. Like other games in its subgenre, I found the act of simply talking to other characters to be among the most compelling things in the game. Arthurton’s inhabitants are all charming figures to talk to, but the dialogue choices are also interesting for the fact that they seem to allow you to influence Jenny’s character. While it’s entirely possible to play the game as close to a goody-two-shoes as possible, it’s also possible to play through as a total jerk. I’m not sure to what extent previous choices influence Jenny’s demeanour throughout, but towards the end of the game, I felt like I wasn’t playing the same cheerful little girl as I was at the start. A second playthrough might illuminate some differences, or otherwise the decidedly more snippy and reserved Jenny I ended up with at the end might just be a product of good writing. Beside the dialogue choices, Jenny LeClue (detectivú) features some nicely integrated puzzles. A recurring favourite in the game is a rotating dial puzzle, where three circles within one another have to be lined up, but not all of them move independently of one another. It’s not the most fiendish puzzle of all, but I enjoyed dealing with the increasingly difficult instances, and given my disdain for the Professor Layton series, I appreciated the more casual difficulty. There’s also a nice recurring puzzle where you have to twiddle the knobs on a machine to tune an errant radio signal and get a coded message. It’s all integrated into the story really quite admirably, and it’s by no means the only tricks the game has up its sleeve. Besides this, there are a variety of more involved, larger-scale puzzles that pop up every so often, which I personally think are the best in the game. The searching the environment and interrogation mechanics are scattered around the game, with the former coming in optional and mandatory flavours, and the latter cropping up occasionally, where it’s always story-critical. I bundle these two things together because functionally, they have a lot in common. Searching the environment involves a press of the square or X button, and brings up a magnifying glass which you can scan around you with, and find hidden objects, like important clues, or sick stickers. Interrogation works similarly, with the same magnifying glass, but involves a human subject, and plays out like a slow-motion, interactive version of Sherlock’s rapid-fire deduction schtick. In these instances, you get to quiz people about various aspects of their appearance or clues on their person, leading to more of the game’s great dialogue.
And then, of course, there’s your journal, which contains details about the case and Jenny’s thoughts. This can be accessed at almost all times in the game, and can be plastered with the aforementioned sick stickers.
If I had to condense my thoughts about the gameplay down to a single sentiment, it’s that the gameplay in Jenny LeClue is what Night in the Woods should have been: concise and consistent, with nary an extraneous mechanic. It’s not all plain sailing though, but I’ll get to that.

Before I start putting some crosses on the game’s so far spotless record, it’d be remiss of me not to mention the great writing and what lies in the game’s near future. First, and most important, is that there will be a sequel. Barring tragic circumstances, this is all but a certainty, as the game was funded on kickstarter, and passed the two games goal. There’s also a clear promise from the developers on the Steam page that this is the first part of a two-game collection. In practice, this means that while Jenny LeClue (detectivú) offers a great experience by itself, the game ends on a particularly pointed hook for the second game, and you might therefore want to wait until the second game launches. Besides that, it’s worth knowing that there’s full voice acting planned for the future, which should in and of itself make a second playthrough worthwhile, because the writing I keep mentioning is great. When I mention the writing, I’m not just talking about the dialogue - though that’s great, too - no, I’m on about the whole setup, and how the mystery unfolds. From an intro with a shady figure in a trenchcoat, to a secret, deep underground facility and a mining disaster, Jenny LeClue spins a genuinely intriguing and endearingly kooky narrative. While it never feels like a truly real place, Arthurton is nonetheless an interesting town, and a great setting for the game: a quintessential “quiet little town” with its own history, eccentric locals, and amenities. It’s a deliberate pastiche of all the disproportionately crime-ridden little towns in cosy detective stories you’d read as a kid, and it immediately sells you on the atmosphere of the game. Then, of course, there’s the characters themselves, who have some particularly great dialogue. Jenny herself, naturally, has the majority of the dialogue in the game, and - at least for my playthrough - I found that her character went through a fairly profound arc. Starting out the game as a cheerful, murder-fixated little detectivette, Jenny’s world is well and truly turned upside down by the first real murder of her career, and the subsequent investigation of her mother. With her father’s disappearance still a sore spot, and what few relationships she has now thoroughly strained, Jenny suddenly finds herself in well above her head.



Throughout my playthrough, I watched a tiny, wide-eyed, gap-toothed girl lose everything, flounder around, stumble on a massive conspiracy, harden herself, and eventually become the serious detective she was always meant to be. The supporting cast also have some great lines and development, too, with Kieth as Jenny’s ever-tolerant friend, and Susan Glatz as Jenny’s affluent cousin-come-sidekick. There’s even a great character moment with Jenny’s mother later on in the game, which I won’t spoil. Point is, they’re all characters I loved spending time with, and I can’t wait to dive into the sequel when it comes out.

At this point, it’d be easy to hand this game a glowing score and walk away whistling, but there’s just a couple of nagging details here that save Jenny LeClue from a perfect rating.

I don’t feel good about handing out a dressing down on a game this good, but it has to be done. While most of my other issues with the game stem from stylistic, narrative, or other more subjective quibbles, poor performance is something that nobody likes, and I’m afraid that Jenny LeClue simply falls foul in that regard. I’ll freely admit that running this game in 4K isn’t representative of the majority of PC players, but with that said, I experienced significant, frequent, and unexplained stutter issues throughout. With not one 3D object in sight, my GTX 1080 should have been able to absolutely eat this game for breakfast (it runs on an iphone, for crying out loud), but instead, the game delivered frames at a sometimes wildly inconsistent rate. This issue seemed to pop up most often when I moved the camera diagonally, and if I had to guess, I’d say that my hard drive might have been at fault, but that’s no excuse. The bottom line is that I had issues running it, on a PC that can run Quantum Break. That shouldn’t be the case.

That aside, it’s time to address that thing about it running on an iphone, because I’m convinced that one of the only deficiencies in the gameplay is a result of that iphone port. While a lot of the other mechanics are more involved, there are nevertheless, sections where you simply push the Cross/A button to make things happen. It’s meant to be either an indicator of effort, or a further demonstration of Jenny’s observational prowess, but like in my review of Virginia, the overall result is just a cutscene that you have to push a button to make happen. It’s “Press F to pay respects” played out as a recurring mechanic, and I suspect that it’s either something that might be more compelling in the iphone port, or something that might have originally been more complex, simplified for touch controls. The long and short of it is that these sequences don’t add anything to the game, and simply removing them or making them more involved would fix the issue. There’s also the issue of difficulty in the game, insofar as I would have appreciated some more of it. As it stands, the game won’t let you come out of some of the sections without completing it correctly. While I appreciate that this is targeted towards an audience looking for a more relaxing title, I think an option to turn on failures would make the gameplay just that little bit more interesting. With some extra work, it would be possible to mix the failures into the narrative, or have the game close off some routes if you fail an interrogation or miss a detail, resulting in a version of Jenny who isn’t always perfect, but gets there in the end, or who bungles through on luck alone. As it is, I know there’s things I’ve missed, and there has to be content exclusive to some choices, but I would have appreciated a way to do better or worse, and have it affect the outcome. It doesn’t have to result in a bad ending, and would ideally be optional, but I think the game would benefit from such a feature. Finally, there’s the framing device for the game, and I feel like a real pedant pulling this one up. You have to understand that for as beefy as this segment is, all these complaints are minor, and of those complaints, this is almost certainly the most insignificant of them all, but I can’t say that I enjoyed the framing device of a childrens’ author all that much. Arthur J Finklestein is a fun character, and, being the author of Jenny’s story, has divine power over her fate. From our perspective as players, Arthur makes for an interesting foil and returning character throughout, but I feel that his inclusion frequently hurt the narrative. At the end of some segments in the game, there are bits where you play as Arthur himself, and sometimes have to make decisions about the outcome of the story: while that makes for an interesting choice scenario, I’m afraid I found myself rather pulled out of the experience by it. The metanarrative of an author wrestling against publisher interference, and against unruly characters is certainly an interesting way of framing the story, but the segments often come at crucial moments in the story, and the interactive element doesn’t really do much for me. Sadly, I found myself rather wishing that the segments would just end. In fact, as cute a device as Finklestein makes, I wonder if Jenny LeClue (detectivú) wouldn’t work better if the developers just played the story completely straight. The narrative and gameplay are strong enough by themselves, and I’ve played games with far more abstract visuals and storylines that didn’t need a framing device. As an alternative, I think if the segments really needed to be split up, then perhaps a Hanna-Barbera-style Saturday morning cartoon might make for a less intrusive bookend to the game’s chapters. There could even be some fun in there with the announcer saying things like “Will Jenny finally bond with Susie? Who is the man in black? Why is CJ’s fashion sense so terrible? Tune in next week for Jenny LeClue! detectivú!”
Alternately, my tastes could be terrible, and anything I say about narrative devices should be discarded immediately.



At the end of this all, I find myself pondering the game’s overall place in the grand scheme of things. While I would truly love for this game to get a deep foothold and become a leading light in its genre, I feel like something as tidily contained and adorable as this might just not have the wider appeal that it deserves, given the clear talent involved in it. That’s not necessarily a bad thing at all, mind you - the game more than cleared its kickstarter goal - but I could see this reaching a cult status with just a bit more polish, and being talked about in the right circles. While I relished my time with the diminutive, titular detective, I feel that just a bit of work in some key areas would have yielded a greater following than it has. It’s a great game, and well worth your time, and all my gripes aside, if they stick the landing on the second game, then I’ll be sure to let you folks know. Until then, I’ll be writing a review I should have written years ago.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a murder to investigate.



Flobknocker's avatar
Community review by Flobknocker (January 29, 2020)

Flobknocker is the nonsensical nom-de-plume of a British guy who occasionally writes about videogames, and who belongs to a mysterious cult that all gather round a helmet every weekend to perform rituals in the hope of bringing about a new Motorstorm game

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Nightfire posted January 30, 2020:

Thanks for the great review. This one has also been on my wishlist for a little while, I'll probably pick it up when the price is right.

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