Around a month ago (as of this writing), Steam offered the Indie Story Pack for $5 -- containing Puzzle Agent, Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale, Gish, And Yet It Moves, and Jolly Rover. I already owned three of the games; I was mostly concerned with getting a 75% discount on Recettear, and so was virtually everyone else; it was only by happenstance that I ended up getting Jolly Rover as a pack-in. It's probably lying unclaimed in most users' accounts as I type this. Recettear turned out to be a little too "Huzzah! Yayness! I'm a translator, and I'm having fun with my job -- just like Adam Smith! (you know who that is, right?)" for me that day, so I turned to Jolly Rover to get my money's worth out of this pack.
The sales pitch the Steam marketplace gives for this game bogs you down with a lot of backstory. 'Gaius James Rover is a chef, inventor of the famous beverage Jolly Rover, but his father was a clown, and he aspired to be a clown too, but --' when all the player really needs is "Anthropomorphic dogs; scurvy pirates; fully-featured point-and-click adventure; $9.95. GET GOING." When I opened it up I was prepared for an adventure that rode Monkey Island's coattails, but as it turns out, it's an unabashedly genuine piece of fiction that stands perfectly well on its own.
Premise/Mechanics
The main character, "Jolly" James Rover, is a cookie-cutter adventure hero; eager and steadfast, ready to prove himself at any opportunity. He has the voice of a doe-eyed Englishman on the cusp of a grand voyage. From time to time, he consults a book with cute pictures in it to help him combine certain items together. A few super-diehard adventure nerds might get what I'm driving at, here; combine this with the anthropomorphics on display and you have a weird pirate dachshund version of Flicker from Blazing Dragons.En route to deliver a shipment of the beverage he invented, he's assaulted by a band of pirates, his shipment is stolen, and he himself is taken hostage. Matters are made worse when the shipment's intended recipient demands his downpayment back, which James simply can't afford. It's up to James to take matters into his own hands and figure out a way to earn some money -- And So Our Story Begins. Is there nefarious business behind the collection of this sought-after macguffin? Will a girl turn up, and if so, does Rover get her? Will he discover something new about himself that helps him save the day? (the answers: yes, yes, and yes, obviously.)
So, it's kind of a lukewarm tale, but it's delivered in a really genuine way; every character is fully voiced, every environment is hand-drawn, it doesn't assume that the user has played anything like this before, and every puzzle seems to have been playtested enough to accommodate the average person. The game supposedly comes with a decent hint system (a parrot that asks 'NEED ANY HELP?!' every time you leave a room without having done anything until you tell it to shut its beak); I didn't have to use it at all, despite some appropriately tricky puzzles -- which can be seen as a credit to its design. No matter what the game threw at me, it seemed like I had all the information I needed. I can think of a few Telltale games that could learn a thing or two from this.
Aside from the assorted sameness (and some rather stale acting), Jolly Rover's only real flaw is its reliance on collectibles to enhance its "replayability" (as though anything could be less fun than replaying an adventure with the aim of clicking on a slightly larger amount of objects this time). The game keeps track of four variables: Pieces-of-eight (24 of which can be found throughout the game), crackers (collected in threes -- 90 in all), flag pieces (12 total), and score (Sierra-style, obtained by doing meaningful stuff as you progress through the story). This would be fine, except this game throws points-of-no-return at you every few scenes -- and when I was stuck at the final scene with 23 out of 24 pieces-of-eight I almost wanted to set the game down, right then and there.
Anthropomorphics
I feel like special mention needs to be made of the anthro aspect of this game. Despite playing itself up as a relatively straightforward adventure on the high seas, every character in this story is an anthro dog of some sort. This has practically no bearing on the story or puzzles, but why should it? It adds a bit of flavor to the setting, and makes for some cute and interesting character designs. Compare this to if the same story was being told with human pirates in the actual Carribean, and the story would have to spice itself up in some other way to make itself stand out. The Monkey Island series gets away with this by being wry and self-referential, with goofy aesthetics in every setpiece (to the point where after five (nine?) games it almost becomes tiresome).The characters acknowledge their canine aesthetics everywhere with cheap, cheesy sayings, replacing pronouns like "guy" or "man" with "dog" and "pup". This is a little awkward in a few places; off the top of my head, there's one spot where the leading lady heads to bed, James hints at following her in for fun sexy times, and she responds with "Hah; that's cute, James, but I really would like to sleep. Though if you've got a bone to bury --" and my eyes snapped open "-- you should go out and look for my father's treasure."
Oh -- oh, so she wasn't referring to James's--
...but wait, was she?
Does... does her father's treasure include something he can screw?