Jenny LeClue: Detectivu

Jenny LeClue Detectivu was a charming game that mostly met my high hopes. In this story-based game, I took the role of an aspiring girl detective, learning the ropes through some basic and inconsequential cases such as where Mom left her students’ papers, and working my way up to exploring some much more sinister goings-on. I fully immersed myself in the town of Arthurton, so much that I feel like I now intimately know the place and many of its residents, despite this not being an “open-world” style game.

I was pleased to find that the whimsical, cartoonish aesthetic extends beyond the game’s visual appearance, and into the story and characters. The plot of this story follows a fairly standard pattern, though it’s full of surprises and jokes, many of which had me chuckling out loud to myself. Where the game’s story really excels though is in not so much in the plot, but in the beautiful style of storytelling and in the character development and interactions. We meet a variety of caricature-like but also surprisingly human characters, and I expect every player will find different favorites. Jenny herself is a difficult but ultimately endearing character. She’s full of curiosity and a sense of adventure, but she lacks a certain social awareness and struggles to empathize with her peers. This will frustrate players at times, but always keeps us rooting for her, which makes her the perfect protagonist. I could say way more in praise of this game’s storytelling style, but it just feels like it would be a shame to give any more of it away.

Throughout the story, I was forced to make snap decisions about how Jenny should respond to situations. This worked better than I expected: although at first it seemed like I was sort of being forced to choose Jenny’s personality, in practice, it was more like selecting one of two options that were both perfectly in character for her, and yet were still often different in an interesting way. These were a fun touch because they made me feel more invested in Jenny, even though as far as I could tell, they didn’t have any real bearing on the story. I enjoyed this light-hearted and inconsequential choice-making, but at a few points it started feeling gimmicky as I was forced to make decisions that were presented as critical and game-changing decisions, but which ultimately still had minimal impact. For it to truly feel like a choose-your-own-adventure type game, these decisions would have had to lead to markedly different endgames or different story paths. As far as I can tell, they didn’t.

Most of the game occurs within a sort of 2D side-scrolling exploration environment. Occasionally there are a few minor navigation challenges involving this aspect, but what I found much more interesting were the interactions, puzzles, and various other activities that are presented as Jenny interacts with objects in this 2D world. This sometimes involves interrogating suspects by searching them for tell-tale accessories in a Sherlock Holmes-inspired way, or by searching newspaper clippings for clues, or machines for hints on how to operate them. This true detective work was my favorite part of the game mechanics. It was integrated with the gameplay incredibly well, allowing me to feel clever for noticing something unusual and clicking on it, but letting Jenny fill out the interpretation if I couldn’t quite tell its relevance. Better yet, the game usually let me pause manually before Jenny sketched out the answer, so I actually did have the opportunity in a few cases to figure out, for example, what I made of a suspect’s unbuttoned buttons, before getting Jenny’s evaluation. It was also fun getting to develop some crime-solving “expertise” – my first time picking a lock or smashing through a barrier, it felt mysterious and took me a while, whereas by the end of the game I could do these things in just a few seconds. The puzzles were rarely very difficult, and this was for the best. I enjoy some fiendishly hard puzzles at times, but in the context of this story-based game, it worked better to have puzzles that were just tricky enough to be sort of interesting, but never so challenging as to get me frustrated when I just wanted to progress with the game.

That does bring me to one criticism, though, involving the pacing of the game. For me, the story was at its best when Jenny was interacting with other characters and in doing so, gaining information towards solving the main mystery. Unfortunately, there is a long adventure sequence in the middle-late game in which there’s almost no character interaction for a very long time, and here it started to feel more like I was working through an obstacle course than solving a mystery. The 2D side-scrolling navigation challenges seemed overdone in this section, as if the developers had decided to lengthen this section because they’d completed the story but then realized the game was too short. Furthermore, although the minigame detective puzzles never got me truly stuck, there were a few times in these later areas where I walked around a small area aimlessly for 10 minutes before finally realizing something I’d just missed somewhere I could walk or climb. It would have been nice for Jenny to give me a verbal hint once I had been stuck on this for a while; I suspect that some players will end up looking for answers online when the get stuck.
This was all the more frustrating when I finally did arrive at the ending. No spoilers here, but the ending is a flop – because it turns out it isn’t an ending at all. Some of the mystery is resolved in a manner that is frankly more confusing than satisfying, but much more is left completely open, since apparently this was just the first of many(?) not-yet-released episodes. Since part of my enjoyment of the game was in the anticipation of some resolution (even if there was more left to come in future episodes), this was a big disappointment in spite of an otherwise excellent story up to that point.

There are also a few types of items to be collected along the way – stickers and postcard scraps – but unfortunately, there’s hardly any real reward for finding them. Rather than provide additional tidbits or back story for the characters, which would have made collecting them more worthwhile, the postcards contain messages from seemingly random people with no relation to the story or its characters. They appealed only to my more compulsive “gotta catch ’em all” mentality, which isn’t something I was looking for in this game. These also weren’t much of a challenge to find, as long as I traversed every square inch of each environment at some point. And I was bound to do that anyway, in case there was something actually interesting hidden in an out-of-the-way area.

A great game for people wanting to hear a cute but rich story and feel immersed in it. And an excellent take on the detective genre, which is rarely done better than they did it here. The developers deserve a round of applause for making me feel like a true detective while playing this game. That said it’s not for people looking for a true challenge or a proper “game” involving a lot of puzzles or skilled maneuvering or that sort of thing. And although the overall plot is exciting, the ending is disappointing due to its blatant lack of resolution – this isn’t a spoiler at all, just something you deserve to know before playing.