First of all, I can’t
tell you whether this game is called New York 1901: Jack the Ripper
or Jack the Ripper: New York 1901, because the two title
screens for the game are inconsistent. Let’s just stick with
Jack for the purposes of this review.

Anyway,
Jack feels very much like a follow-up to Microïds’
2003 adventure,
Post Mortem, though it was developed by the studio that
brought us the two Cameron Files games. And like all of the above-mentioned
games, Jack is a mixed blessing.

A murder mystery is one
of the best types of stories for a graphic adventure to tell. The
premise of Jack is rock-solid. A young reporter on a New
York newspaper in 1901 thinks he may be on the trail of a returned
Jack the Ripper, who’s now stalking the streets of New York
thirteen years after the unsolved Whitechapel murders in London.

This premise leads to by
far the game’s best feature: its story. The reporter has very
little to go on at first, aside from a crime report from the Police
Chief and a couple of people to interview.

As in other mystery adventures,
navigation is accomplished through a map of Lower Manhattan (inexplicably
called “The Lowside District” in the game). As new witnesses
give you additional inventory items that point to new locations, you
can use these items to activate new places on the map to visit.

Once
your reporter has the great idea to use the services of Pinkerton
Detective Agency (inexplicably misspelled in the game as “Pinkerten”),
the story kicks up, if not into high gear, at least out of neutral.
A light board at Pinkerton’s allows you to compare two important
pieces of information that reveal a chilling truth (which I won’t
reveal here).

The game is extremely thin
in the puzzle department. Most of the gameplay consists of repeatedly
visiting locations, speaking to characters, and gradually opening
up the story. You spend a lot of time talking to the same small group
of characters, so it’s a good thing that character models aren’t
bad, and some (though not all) of the voice acting is reasonably good.

The game takes place over
a series of days, each of which have two parts: After gathering new
information for the next day’s story, the player can click on
a typewriter to trigger the end of the working day and the typing
of the story. Then there’s a nocturnal episode, which eventually
ends with some variation of a moon graphic.

Two of these nighttime
episodes, which take place in different parts of the bowels of a creepy
hospital, are very scary and atmospheric. The second one, particularly,
reminded me of the only good sequence in 2001’s Necronomicon
(remember the underground lab?). Creepy. There are also a couple of
stealthy objectives (spying on a suspect artist and attempting to
get a photo of Jack himself) which are also entertaining.

What
puzzles there are in the game are very organic to the story and surroundings,
and I give the developers credit for that. Organic puzzles are not
easy!

The story also develops
a couple of very good red herring suspects.

The graphics, while fairly
low-resolution and unimpressive technically, nevertheless do a good
job of suggesting the back alleys of Lower Manhattan at the turn of
the century. The character models seem to have an extra gloss on them,
which makes them stand out from the scenery in a pretty unnatural
way. This could be seen as a good thing or a bad thing, I guess, depending
on your taste. The artists also have a good time with the various
moon graphics that end the nocturnal episodes. One particularly good
one morphs the moon into a sort of astral beating heart.

The game is in first person
point-and-click format with 360 degree scrolling. Overall the presentation
of the game will be quite familiar to anyone who has been playing
French adventure games for the last few years.

I
want to make a special mention of the music in this game. The fact
that one of the main characters is a music hall singer provides one
of the best pleasures in Jack. Several times you can take
a break from your sleuthing and listen to some very well-performed
songs (even better, the songs are performed by a major character!).
Yan Volsy wrote the game’s effective score, and provided the
music for the songs that don’t use traditional melodies. Djazia
Satour does a beautiful job with the singing.

Okay, so we have a killer
who may be Jack the Ripper stalking the streets of New York in 1901.
So what’s not to like?

There’s a Buddhist
saying, “Before enlightment, you chop wood and carry water.
After enlightenment, you chop wood and carry water.” One of
the points of this saying is that small things matter The problem
with Jack is that when you play it, it feels like not enough
small things mattered to the developers. There’s the inconsistency
in the game’s very title. There’s the odd misspellings
like “Pinkerten” and awkward translations like using the
word “chronicle” when the far more appropriate choice
would have been simply “story.” (I have trouble picturing
even turn-of-the-last-century hard-boiled New York newspaper editors
yelling at their reporters to hurry up and finish their “chronicles.”)
There’s that neighborhood name, “The Lowside District.”
There’s no such district in New York, and there wasn’t
one in 1901 – and since the game was using real locations and
street names, why not use real neighborhood names? And there’s
the problem with The World Series, which figures prominently in the
plot. Trouble is, the World Series didn’t exist in 1901.

More
irritating is the fact that it can be very difficult sometimes to
get the chapters to “close.” You find yourself trudging
over and over through locations you’ve seen a dozen times, trying
with increasing frustration to get that damn moon graphic to appear,
signaling the fact that you’ve closed the chapter. This strikes
me as just sloppy programming.

Even weirder, there’s
this inexplicable attempt by the developers to link the Jack the
Ripper character with Edgar Allen Poe’s “Raven.”
At various crime scenes, your character sees an ominous raven and
has a series of inscrutable hallucinations (which never add up to
anyting). At the end of the game the villain even quotes Poe’s
famous poem. Uh,why? Poe never wrote about Jack the Ripper. He’s
not associated with him in any way I have ever heard of. It would
be one thing if the game had created an interesting fictional link
between the two. Remember in Gabriel
Knight 2, in which Jane Jensen brazenly dreamed up a relationship
between Mad King Ludwig and Richard Wagner, resulting in an insane
lost werewolf opera? This game doesn’t bother to do any of that
dramaturgical heavy lifting. It just throws this silly raven at you,
and the results are, well, puzzling.

Finally, the worst news
is that, by the end of the game, the creators of Jack the Ripper
betray their game’s best feature: its story. The game’s
conclusion is a utter boondoggle, meaning all of the information you’ve
so painstakingly gathered means absolutely nothing. It’s a serious
disappointment after following an otherwise compelling, if somewhat
shakily told, story.

Final Grade: C+

System Requirements:

• System Requirements:
  Windows® 95/98/2000/ME/XP
• Pentium® III 500MHz
  (Pentium® IV 800MHz Recommended)
• 64MB Ram (128 MB Recommended)
• 16 MB Direct3D®
  Compatible Video Card (32 MB Recommended)
• DirectX®7 Compatible
  Sound Card

This
review is copyright Ray Ivey and Just Adventure and
may not be republished elsewhere without the express written consent
of the author. Republication of said review must also contain a link
back to Just Adventure.