44 The Jail Reviews

Very good game, with an interesting little twist at the end. I wouldn’t call it a “horror”game really, although I did jump a couple of times, lol. I rather enjoyed the retro pixel art style too, and the fact that it wasn’t full of tons of frustrating puzzles was a bonus for me, It probably took me about 3-4 hours to complete the whole game, and because of that, the price is very reasonable. Maybe one teeny little criticism is that I wish there had been an option to increase the walking speed, as there is quite a bit of backtracking back & forth during most of the game…but not really a big deal as it were, Definitely worth playing! I’d love to see what this Dev comes up with next…!

44 The Jail is an interesting narrative-driven adventure game with its pros and cons. It has inventory items and dialog trees but essentially no puzzles, at least until the last chapter. Mostly we just need to figure out where to go next or which NPC to talk to. We do a bit of exploration, participate in some simple activities and engage in dialogs with NPCs, where we can make some small changes to how the story unfolds or select a backstory we like for a character. Which I think works great because this kind of simple gameplay can be very immersive, giving us the feeling of participation in the story. The game has a very small number of locations, and the location design is quite simple, but the graphics, animations and lighting effects are pretty good for a pixel art game. Large detailed sprites give more personality to the characters. A game of this kind can be rushed through in a very short time, but, for a normal playthrough, the 2 hours of playtime mentioned on the store page is certainly an underestimate. There are some instances where the event-driven gameplay could have been implemented a little better so as to give the player an indication of what the next objective is or to make it clearer whether or not there are some optional objectives left. The last chapter suddenly introduces some very contrived puzzles, very unnecessary pop culture references and in-jokes and quite a few objects which I wasn't able to do anything with. At the same time, I was carrying too many items which turned out to have no use. It seems that too much stuff was made optional, with many easy-to-miss interactions. So it's possible that I missed some important connections, but I found most of the story implausible and the motivations for most of the characters' actions unconvincing. The English translation is not very good. Other than that, there are only some minor technical issues, such as a jittery animation if an NPC is following us and the screen starts scrolling, a hotspot without a tooltip or a black screen after the credits. There is no way to turn off auto-advance mode for text.