|| REVIEW || Jessika (PC)
Developed By : Tritrie Games Published By : Assemble Entertainment
Category : Narrative, FMV, Indie
Release Date : August 25, 2020
When I was a kid, it always felt pretty neat when there was an FMV moment or two in the games I played. I didn't realize it at the time, but it was pretty impressive to get those scenes on sometimes, given how much space they took up and how limited said space was. Over the last few years, though, I've noticed an upswing in FMV games, where they take on a strong narrative in a sort of choose-your-own-adventure style.
None of the ones that I had seen really pulled me in, but Jessika caught my attention. You play as a version of "yourself" as you start working for a company who's main purpose is to help the families of those who have passed on. Namely in the form of those who lost family to suicide, this is a way for those family members to maybe gain some answers as to why their relative might have chosen such a path, by going through some of their personal data and seeing what can be uncovered.
You're the companies newest employee, and are being granted a sort of test period. This is for the company to see how well you perform as well as for you to see how much you may or may not like the job. In this test period, you'll be working with their newest client, the father of a woman named Jessika. She is believed to have committed suicide and it's up to you to go through her things and see if you can discover any useful answers.
Granted access to her IP address remotely, you're able to sift through her data by entering keywords into the companies decryptor program. When the keywords you enter are relevant to anything, any associated files will come up which you can then either view if they are pictures or videos, or sometimes read if a text file comes up.
The files you find will have different levels of difficulty attached to them. These tougher files are encrypted in a different way and will need a specific number of keywords before they can be fully accessed. You'll never know how many keywords a file needs exactly to be opened so you'll need to keep hunting. You do, though, have a running count in the top of the decryptor program that tells you how many files you've uncovered, how many have been unlocked, and how many you've opened.
You'll need to use these files to help discover more keywords to try and search for, but hacking for answers won't be the only thing you're doing. Since this is your first assignment, you'll be sharing some details with a few other people in charge, but you'll also be sharing data with Jessika's father. On your computer is a messaging app, and if a file is relevant enough it will pop something up to prompt you to send it to someone. This will trigger a short text conversation where you'll have a few options to choose from in responding.
For it being my first full FMV game, I didn't know what to expect when I started playing Jessika. At the base, though, it reminded me of a few other games I had played that focused on hacking and you "playing" via your virtual system. The story for this game though was pretty entertaining, although I wish it could have been delivered in a more linear way.
Certain moments in the game progress based off of uncovering a specific file or two. Because of this, and the fact that files are uncovered based on keyword searches, a couple of times I found myself hitting that next progression step and being decently shocked. Only to find out that I had apparently "missed" some earlier files that would have alluded to things and made the twist make a little bit more sense instead of just being some crazy plot device.
In the end thought it's a very fun and very interesting game, and it's definitely turned me on to the idea of checking out other FMV titles. If you're an achievement hunter, you can still sift through through her data to try and uncover all of the files. Other than that, there really isn't much else to do. The story is very linear, and quite short (it took me a little under 3 hours to get through everything). And because of it's linearity there's not much value in replaying either. While I do highly recommend playing this game, I also recommend picking it up once it's on sale, because the price is affordable but for the little bit of time you'll be playing this, it could be a bit lower.
What's most upsetting though is the shift in tone of the game. It starts off on the obvious subject of suicide, and even goes so far as to have your in-game character receive some helpful and uplifting emails about how and where to reach out should you be feeling this way. Without spoiling or revealing too much, the subject matter doesn't strictly stay on this point and ends up diving into other equally dark areas, so it can potentially be a shock to the player's system in more ways than one.
Game Rating : 6 / 10
Pick up the game HERE on Steam
A code for this game was graciously provided
to the site for purpose of a review
