Review of Jolly Rover by emric

it contains a very useful interface enhancement that i don’t remember being used in any other adventure game i’ve played—the rollover text label for an object or character is a different colour if there is unread information about it. so unlike most adventure games, you don’t have to hear a repeated message before you know that you’ve heard all the details about something—you can see it instantly with just a rollover. very smart!

overall structure and puzzle design are very neat and logical and at just the right level of difficulty to get you thinking, but not have you frustrated and stuck (and there’s an effective hint system available to make sure you progress smoothly too). the voice-acting is mostly quite good. the writing isn’t too adventurous, but is perfectly suitable.

the biggest complaint i had about it is that the artwork wasn’t lush or particularly attractive, in fact i’d describe it as kinda drab (but perhaps my feelings were emphasised cos i recently played ‘the whispered world’ which has just about the most gorgeous 2D painted backgrounds i’ve seen in any adventure game).

oh, actually an even bigger criticism i had was the excessive artwork compression. i don’t know why you’d need to compress the artwork at all! the whole game looked as if low-quality jpegs were used with noticeable compression artefacts present in every scene. and that’s a shame, cos in most other areas of the game they got things pretty right. the version i played was downloaded (thru steam i think). perhaps there’s an alternative/updated release of it available now which has uncompressed graphical assets. if so i’d recommend that one.