Jake's Love Story Reviews

[u][b]Jake's Love Story[/b][/u] is a lackluster, poor-quality, and extremely short slice-of-life visual novel which takes place over the course of three years in a high school based on the Polish school system pre-2019. The story follows four characters who, surprisingly, aren't exact copies of the stereotypical tropes that you'd find in most visual novels which is pleasantly refreshing but unfortunately not redeeming enough to save the game by any means. Overall, I don't recommend it because it's a subpar and amateurish game that doesn't do anything well at all, except maybe draw a few chuckles from you with some of the dialogue options, and isn't worth your time compared to any number of other visual novels which are higher in quality, have a meaningful message (or a message altogether), are thought-provoking, or are frankly just more enjoyable. [hr][/hr] [quote][b]S U M M A R Y[/b][/quote] - The gameplay is typical for the genre and there isn't anything noteworthy about it; - The replay value is relatively low because it's hard to care for the game enough to play through it multiple times in order to see the various outcomes and endings; - The graphics are pretty shoddy as the character artwork looks flat as well as inhuman which is quite unnerving; - The soundtrack is unremarkable and fits the game well as background noise but nothing more; and - The story is very simplistic and mundane while doing nothing exciting with the material that it does have. [hr][/hr] [quote][b]A C H I E V E M E N T S[/b][/quote] The game has 12 achievements which should take less than an hour and a half to acquire since a few are freebies while the rest are tied to the nine endings that are simple to achieve. [hr][/hr] [quote][b]R E V I E W[/b][/quote] [h3]Gameplay[/h3] The gameplay is standard for the genre, although it's easy enough to simultaneously swoon both love interests in order to view all nine endings in one save file. Although this is convenient for seeing all of endings very quickly, it makes the game feel too rigid in terms of its structure because the few branching paths that the game has are composed only of the "good" or "bad" choices and there is little nuance between these two choices which results in the game feeling overly-simplistic and very linear. [h3]Graphics[/h3] The graphics are quite crude as the character artwork is lacking 3D depth and shading, the body proportions are off, and the male characters look like inhuman and almost alien-like thanks to their odd-looking features. This is particularly noticeable on the titular main character but that may also be because his portrait is drawn from straight on as if he were directly facing a camera unlike the artwork for everyone else who is slightly askew in comparison. Disappointingly, none of the characters' artwork changes as they age throughout the three-year story, only the girls have different outfits and costumes, and only one of them has different poses and facial expressions. [h3]Sound[/h3] The soundtrack is composed of mediocre royalty-free songs from [u][url=https://www.hooksounds.com/]Hook Sounds[/url][/u] which fit the game well as background noise but are otherwise completely forgettable. The developers have a frequent habit of using a grating record scratch sound whenever a character says something out of place or you make a "bad" decision which comes off as patronizing and interrupts the mood of the scene by breaking your immersion in the story. [h3]Story[/h3] The story is very boring and generic because it doesn't do anything exciting with the everyday events that you play through, it doesn't subvert your expectations in any way, it has no stakes, and it does very little to keep you invested in it. Your reward for persevering and seeing the nine endings will be utter disappointment as they are drab and only vary slightly between one another due to the different relationships that can occur between the characters. The script also has a few typos and grammatical errors here and there, making it obvious that English isn't the developer's first language or localization wasn't done perfectly, but this is a very minor issue. The characters also have a plethora of issues: they aren't particularly likeable and never grow or develop throughout the story, the game constantly skips huge chunks of time which ruins the flow of the game (sometimes giving you only a few sentences between time skips), these time skips artificially extend the timeline of the story when it could have fit better in one school year instead, the main character's introspective monologue constantly questions the "bad" choices you make which feels chiding, and one of the girls constantly breaks the fourth wall which quickly becomes wearisome and just seems like a baseless attempt at cheap humor. Lastly, the game has one very questionable scene which involves the over-sexualization of one of the girls, who is most likely 16 years old at the time of the scene (based on the age stipulations of the Polish school system). Although the scene might be realistic, it simply feels wrong to witness it as an adult due to her age. [h3]Conclusion[/h3] Overall, I don't recommend it because it's quite a bad visual novel, especially when compared to the plethora that are available on Steam. Instead, I recommend trying two of recent my favorite visual novels, [u][url=https://store.steampowered.com/app/310080/Hatoful_Boyfriend/]Hatoful Boyfriend[/url][/u] and [u][url=https://store.steampowered.com/app/698780/Doki_Doki_Literature_Club/]Doki Doki Literature Club[/url][/u], both of which have a far more gripping story, plenty of plot twists, thought-provoking messages, and unique charms of their own. That being said, I did have some fun with this game but only because I intentionally sabotaged everything by constantly picking the "bad" choices and whose outcomes made me chortle a few times; however, I also had a coupon which massively reduced its price. Nevertheless, I still wouldn't recommend it even when it is on sale. In fact, I can't believe that the developers raised the price of this game to 10.00 USD a few years ago...I honestly can't imagine paying that much for such an amateur production.

I bought this because it was on sale, cost 99 cents. Thought I give it try and oh boy I laugh so hard on my first playthrough for 30 mins. After a while it gets boring and cringe, kept telling myself on repeat, "omg why did I buy this game?" Really goes to show, a lesson for me, never buy games just because its cheap.

Jake's Love Story is a Visual Novel with multiple endings. I don't think I've ever played this rushed of a project before. The whole thing took me less than an hour to read, all 9 endings included. I did not skip a single dialogue. The game constantly timelapses to a point it gets annoying, sometimes you are prompted with 'a few days later,' you get 4-5 more one-liners from a character and you're already prompted with another 'the next day.' This game lacks content like crazy, the characters are not very interesting and there's an immersion breaking '4th wall joke' every few minutes... The endings are super similar to one another, all of them are rushed and you feel absolutely no emotions for playing this game. This isn't a romantic or dramatic love story, it's just teenagers going to prom together because they get along well. The backgrounds are nice, but the characters art is subpar. The music is not very good either. The writing is stiff and emotionless. Honestly I did not enjoy any of it, the whole experience was pretty boring... it's just endless chitchats and empty blabbering. Overall, a disappointing and extremely short visual novel.

Jake's Love Story is not a game, it's an e-book that's been dumped on Steam masquerading as a game. As a visual/interactive novel, this doesn't feature any notable gameplay, it's just a lot of clicking through badly written dialogue that would never have been accepted or published in print, which poses the question, "How did something this badly written end up on Steam?". When someone hoping to become an author is unable to get published in print, they spend $100 and dump their high school fan-fiction onto Steam, under the guise of a game. This e-book was slapped together with the godawfully bad RenPy Visual Novel/E-Book construction kit, so just like no professional writing took place here, no professional game development took place either, it's just a product of filling out templates in the construction kit. This E-book features Choose-Your-Own-Adventure elements where you make some decisions that don't do anything to change the fact this is just an E-Book. Nobody finished reading a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book and said "Boy, what a great game I just played!". Because E-books aren't games. And neither is this. The "author" couldn't even work out a good plot for an e-book so this is just about him going to school and talking to his imaginary girlfriend/waifu. You can't make this stuff up... there's literally hundreds of e-books on Steam like this where the authors fantasize about women liking them. And as always, we must ask what value this has for us, the gamers? None! These aren't even PC games. Visual novels/e-books are tedious at best... imagine the best novel you ever read, be that Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy or 2001: A Space Odyssey or Twilight (if you have terrible taste in literature), but then translate that to a format where the words dribble out and you have to click your mouse every time you wanted to read the next sentence, instead of just turning the pages. You'd think it was garbage. Now imagine that experience, but with much worse writing (because if these guys could write professionally, they'd be published authors and this would be on shelves in bookstores, and they wouldn't have to pay Valve $100 to self-publish this on Steam), and you have your average Steam e-book. One of the chief problems with failed authors polluting Steam with non-game E-books is that E-books can easily just be presented in a web browser... there's no justification for charging money on Steam for what might as well be a webpage. We don't spend thousands on buying a gaming rig to spend money on Steam for something Chrome or Firefox could do. You can get better quality books and comics for free online or from public libraries, or from bookstores for a fraction of the price of this "game". Steam isn't a comic book store, neither is it Netflix, it's for games. Your gaming rig is not a Kindle. It's impossible for me to recommend things to PC gamers that aren't really games. This E-Book has been translated from some other language into English... badly. If this was done through Google Translate, Google Translate should feel ashamed of itself. Regardless, the language in this game is broken and will put off a lot of gamers. These technical defects push this E-Book below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. The poor quality of this E-Book is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak reader number was only 6 readers. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only reader activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 100,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality E-Book is to be expected. So, should you buy this E-Book? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam? Jake's Love Story is relatively cheap at $3 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the E-Book, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend. This is also competing with over 14,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.