Jack Orlando: A Cinematic Adventure

Honestly, after all the varied and actually-kinda-fun-in-a-bad-way games I've played I've come to realize even more that the absolute worst thing you can be is boring.

Because, like, even if you're a complete and total failure in basically every way it's still at the very least for me a worthwhile experience just to see where exactly things go wrong. It's personally fun for me — even if the actual game isn't fun to play — to look at the aspects of bad things as I go along to try and figure out why specifically, it doesn't work, and how it could be improved or whether it could've been good in another game or circumstance. There's a lot of ways to learn what to do through seeing how something falls, and something with no 'good' elements can still be educational so long as you're willing to look from a bit of an analytical lens, and also have fun at the game's expense.

It can't, however, if the most you can really say about a game is that it's... really dull, more than anything.

I mean, it's possible to place emphasis on how the game dives headfirst into the worst aspects of 90s adventure games with too many items (especially ones that you don't ever actually use on anything) and mechanics that the player can use at a time, really confusing puzzles that no-one in their right mind would be able to intuit, and game design where it's very easy to softlock and render the game unwinnable if you don't know exactly what's coming, but even then it's not especially egregious in a way other bad adventure games aren't. You could talk about how Jack Orlando is just a really unlikeable protagonist who antagonizes near everyone he meets, but, like, aside from near the beginning he isn't even an asshole in a fun way — he's just dour and randomly rude and actively bigoted at points and it fucking sucks to play as him. The plot theoretically, is absolutely ludicrous and stupid, but because it's a noir it just takes itself so serious and dour the entire time — you just talk to greyscale characters and then talk to greyscale characters sifting through dialogue that's absolutely dull and aside from a couple of moments which are hilarious it's just... dull. It's boring. I played this game with friends and nearly all of them left before the end because absolutely nothing was happening.

And that's the main reason why I consider Jack Orlando to be among the worst games I've played. I've played through boring before, but generally at the very least those games are at least competent enough in some aspect that they're able to just be mediocre and not actively bad. I've played through bad, but at the very least most bad games are bad in a way that makes them worthwhile/educational. Jack Orlando, though, hits the Venn Diagram where none of its aspects really work at all but also aren't really all that fun to see how they fail — this is just a game where you trudge through a dry and monotonous 1930s prohibition-era noir plot trying to exonerate and give this actively awful person his redemption while you basically have to follow a walkthrough because there are so many items that are there and do nothing and so many puzzles that don't have a clear solution at all and so many ways that you can get softlocked into a bad ending because of this design. It's a slog, more than anything else, and given how the game... really doesn't have anything going for it?

Yeah. I stand by my score. I wouldn't even say, like, watch a video to see what this game has to offer without spending your money — you really do just get nothing out of this.