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A Deadly Mystery

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: April 09, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Jack the Ripper harkens computer gamers back to earlier times, in more ways than one. The new release from The Adventure Company represents a nostalgic return to the point-and-click affairs, of which 1993's Myst is the archetype.

What's more, Jack the Ripper is a well-crafted adventure that for many will rekindle interest in the grisly Whitechapel murders that panicked London and frustrated Scotland Yard in 1888. The topic has rarely been treated in the video-game medium, and never so well.

Far from a rehash of the English case, Jack the Ripper moves the investigation across the sea and 13 years into the future.

The year is 1901, and the setting is New York City. Over the course of a fortnight, two prostitutes are found butchered. The killer's bloody handiwork is reminiscent of the famed Whitechapel case, but local police are quick to place the blame on feuding opium traders. Gamers, of course, know better.

Players assume the role of James Palmer, an ambitious but untested reporter for a turn-of-the-century New York newspaper.

Driven by a hard-bitten editor (hmmm, this part sounds vaguely familiar), Palmer takes to the streets of New York in search of a story. While Palmer can jump freely among crime scenes, the police station, his newspaper office, and other locations, his progress is strictly linear. He must complete specific activities to advance the plot.

Using the mouse, Palmer interacts with other characters and objects by clicking on them. Humans are well-rendered, with shifting, blinking, photorealistic eyes as well as lips that move in proper synchronization with spoken words. Jack the Ripper's period settings are also well-done, creating a plausible Big Apple, circa 1901.

Solving the Ripper mystery requires Palmer to meet with a variety of quirky characters, including cops, hustlers, and a beautiful Irish singer named Abigail. He will dig through old documents from the Scotland Yard case, and even receive correspondence from the evil Jack, who takes a liking to Palmer's punchy stories. The game also throws several challenging puzzles in the reporter's path, although these are not convincingly related to the story and thus seem for the most part like stereotypical video-game devices.

Once mastered, Jack the Ripper's game interface is easy to use. The mastery is the tricky part, however; my copy included neither manual nor Help file. I was fortunate to locate a kindred Jack player in the GameFAQS Forum (www.gamefaqs. com) who was able to ease my frustration. This surprising lack of documentation adds to the game's mystery, although not in a good way.

Despite the spooky subject matter and the occasional gory image, Jack the Ripper is not an especially violent game. It will appeal to puzzle and adventure fans, as well as those with even a passing interest in the Whitechapel murders.(...)

Fun, but wish I'd bought it used

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: August 28, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I enjoyed this game while I was playing it, even though it does constrict your movements some, as has been mentioned in other reviews. I thought the graphics were good, and had no problem playing it on a 2 yr old laptop (didn't need to upgrade anything.) My 11 yr old daughter sat next to me most of the time I played, and she enjoyed watching it (and it wasn't too graphic for her.) We both have the same complaint, though... the ending was lame, and came too soon (after only 12 days, game time.)

I bought this brand-new less than a week ago and am now ready to sell it, because it is not one to play over and over again, discovering new things each time. It was fun to play, once, and because of that I wish I'd bought it used!

Dead End

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: January 12, 2006
Author: Amazon User

At the beginning of this game you feel like you're really going to solve a mystery but in places it gets really tedious and leaves a cliff hanger at the end. I don't recommend this game, save your money for something like Syberia or Tomb Raider.

The Adventure Company Drops the Ball

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: June 11, 2006
Author: Amazon User

The Adventure Company has a knack for taking high concepts and making them into terrible games. Take for example "The Mystery of the Mummy", a Sherlock Holmes mystery game that made the world's most famous detective seem insipid. As lousy as some of their attempts have been in the past, high concepts keep players coming back to The Adventure Company. "Jack the Ripper" has a concept so ideal it seems impossible to ruin, and yet the game is phenomenally atrocious.

The game is set in New York City in 1901. A couple of poverty-stricken showgirls have been murdered in a fashion similar to the Jack the Ripper killings of 1888. Jimmy Palmer, a nave young reporter, is assigned by his editor to write a series of newspaper articles on the killings. As Jimmy looks into the murders, he discovers that the same serial killer might be responsible for both the 1888 and 1901 murders. There's the high concept. The game play is from the first-person perspective of Jimmy from beginning to end. It consists of returning to the same locations and talking to the same people repeatedly, using dialogue options that aren't really all that optional. Occasionally, Jimmy can collect items such as keys and money to appease stubborn suspects. There are only one or two actual puzzles in the entire game.

The game parades many characters based loosely on actual suspects in the real-life Jack the Ripper murders, but Jimmy never seems to come any closer to solving the mystery. A game called "Jack the Ripper" should at least guarantee a creepy ambience, and the game seems to succeed in that area initially, but it soon becomes apparent that ambience isn't enough. Menacing footsteps when no one is following you, whispered dialogue that is unintelligible and unimportant to the storyline, and shady characters that can't be interacted with and don't contribute anything to the plot become annoying after a short while. In one room, a hushed, secretive whisper resembling "I can sell you the most beautiful radishes" can be heard repeatedly. Dark, blood-stained alleys lose their creepiness after a while. The score is beautiful and unnerving, but it only adds to the misleading feeling that something frightening is going to happen, and it hardly ever does. There are also several moments in the game where Jimmy appears to have a psychic connection with a raven, leading to trippy graphic sequence with no pay-off.

Many critics have noted the series of Irish folk tunes performed by one of the game's characters as a bright spot. The songs themselves are beautiful and haunting, like the game's score, but the animated performances that accompany them are less varied and more mechanical than a floorshow at Chuck E. Cheese's. Also, be warned that there isn't a twist ending, just an anticlimactic one. Maybe someday still The Adventure Company will redeem itself. In the meantime, avoid this game.

Great Gaming!!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 5 / 11
Date: February 24, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Jack the Ripper lives up to the hype. It has excellent graphics, speech, and a storyline that drags you in. I hope they make a part 2!

Lovely to look at, but could've been better.

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: May 04, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Beautiful graphics and music, dark ambiance and a fair amount of Ripperanna, but it could have been much more satisfying if there had been a few more scares; perhaps a confrontation or two with ol' saucy Jack? The ubiquitous raven was puzzling, albeit creepy-cool, and the "Nevermore" reference at the end I supose is to conjure a connection between those ravens and the Ripper? Are they are accusing EA Poe, or are they just milking the popularity of that great poem for all its worth? In any event, the ending is a disappointment, but I did enjoy the journey. I did hope that once the game was over a second level would be unlocked allowing for an increased level of challange, intensity and further pursuit of Jack...maybe a few more years in the future, and with a final resolution. I supose the creators wanted the game to end just as the Ripper murders ended - without closure. I do hope there is a sequel because then I'd feel a bit better about paying twenty dollars for a game that leaves the player feeling a bit cheated. In conclusion, on a scale of one through ten: Graphics-10; Ambience-10; Music-8; Characters-8; Challenge-7; Ease of Use-9; Fright-8; Action-6; Mystery-7; Storyline/writing-6; overall satisfaction-6.

Dull, But Playable

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: June 03, 2004
Author: Amazon User

New York, 1901: the seedy "Lowside" disctrict is rocked by a series of killings that resemble the London "Jack the Ripper" murders twelve yearas before. You play James Palmer, a young reporter for the New York Today. Your boss assigns you to cover the crimes and produce a series of articles that will regain sales lost to your paper's competitor. When your articles start receiving attention, you begin to hear from the killer, himself. Can you trace the hints he drops and prevent another murder?

_Jack the Ripper_ (JTR) is the kind of game that will be familiar to Adventure Purists: one with many fine points, one that has incredible potential to be remarkable, but one that had obviously no been given the time or attention to rise above the mediocre. It's perfectly playable--mildly entertaining, even. But when game developers complain that Adventure doesn't sell, they need look no farther than games like this to find the cause. JTR is boring. I personally don't think that games need lots of action, threats, and timed sequences to be exciting-and, except for one, you won't find them here. But neither do you find very many interesting puzzles, engaging characters, inspiring conversations, great locations, or much of a plot.

The game has its good points. The graphics are nice. The music is actually superb. The navigation and gameplay are smooth and easy. The voice acting isn't bad. The structure is well thought-out. But there just isn't enough going on. Each "day" of the game presents you with certain tasks, and I always was surprised when the day came to an end; I never felt like I had actually done anything. Part of this was because the puzzles were so very easy. Ninety percent were conversation; the rest were a smattering of incredibly simplistic mechanical and inventory, with one timed activity. I had downloaded the U-Hints file for this game, but the only time I ever looked at it was at the end, when I thought, "Is that IT???" In general, I found the puzzles so unchallenging that at one point I resorted to translating a book in French that my character found, just for something to do.

There are numerous red herrings in this game--threads that turn into nothing, places you can go where nothing happens. I suppose this is a realistic representation of investigative journalism, but I found it tiresome. There was also a strange plot element involving a raven and what seemed to be psychic phenomena that was never explained at all.

I disliked the save-game feature. This gave you a limited number (16, I think) of spaces to save thumbnails of your game in progress. 16 slots were about half the number I wanted, and the thumbnails were so small you couldn't tell what they represented. As your game was saved by time and date only, with no opportunity to label them for yourself, this was an irritation.

JTR was also pretty glitchy, particularly in the early portion of the game. Several cutscenes did not run properly and had to be skipped out of. Conversations overlapped and the navigational cursor sometimes didn't appear. Once the game crashed entirely--good thing I had just saved!

The ending of JTR is a disappointment. I realise that the real Jack the Ripper was never verufiably identified, so it would have been going out on a limb to identify him here. But I would have preferred that to what I got. The way the game ended was like the rest of it: wimpy and without challenge.

This game took me about 15 hours to complete, playing a couple hours a night. It was mildly entertaining, as I said. But probably better to wait for the jewel case release.

This game was pretty good

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: May 27, 2004
Author: Amazon User

This game was pretty good, there was one gorey part, not that scary. I did like the music for it though. I liked the ending song that Abigail sings. It is a little bit of a dark game and sometimes it is hard to see what you are doing. Very exciting though. I liked the game overall.

great

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 1 / 2
Date: April 03, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I really enjoyed this game. I thought it was pleasantly different from most of the "go through the weird lands and solve puzzles" games. There were some moments of anticipation of someone jumping out and catching you--fun! And as far as the ending people are complaining about--I thought it was a frustrating but great way to set us up for the sequel--which I will purchase as soon as it comes out.

Not worth it

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: May 24, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I hate nonspecific reviews that just say "this game sucks" but. . . this game sucks!! Ahhh, where to begin? The first thing that bothered me was all the little glitches and idiosyncracies. You WILL sometimes get stuck in an area and not be able to get out- the interface does not always work. If you don't get the puzzles right the very first time, be prepared to go back to your last save because even if you eventually get it right, the game will not let you pass. And, be prepared to do a lot of fiddly walking around to areas that never ever come in useful. And also be prepared, unless you get every character to say every phrase and talk to them in EXACTLY the right order, you will have to retrace your steps-- even if you show up at the correct location with exactly the right idea in mind, it may not do you any good. I would not mind all this stuff if the story was good, but. . . SPOILER WARNING. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . THE ENDING IS NOT REALLY AN ENDING AT ALL!!!!! IT IS ACTUALLY A HUGE LETDOWN/SETUP FOR A SEQUEL!!! This seems to be a recurring trend in Adventure Company games (ie Syberia). That said, the graphics were nice, and the soundtrack definitely kept the spooky mood going (although it was sometimes repetetive). My character occaisionally needed some sort of laser surgery or corrective lens that was not supplied (the backgrounds tend to be blurry). I wish they had started out the first day telling me I would never ever find the killer so at least I went in with my eyes open. Then I would realize that I was spending all this time on eye candy, and not even very good eye candy, and things would have been straightforward.

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