“Oh well, once a fool, always a fool!”
-Jester

Plot Synopsis

You awake in the back of a carriage and can’t remember who you are. Not your name or who you are, not why you are there, absolutely nothing. Not even the strange-looking fellow in front of you who woke you up. You chat with them to learn a bit more of the situation and based on your choices, it will lead you down one of 6 endings.

About

This game was made for the O2A2 VN jam. For those who don’t know, Only One of Any Asset (O2A2) is a jam on itch.io where devs are limited in what they can make with their game. They only have 10 days to make and release the game (if they want to participate). They are only allowed one asset of each major part of the game. So one sprite/character/pose, one day/environment/background, one thousand words, etc.

Because of these restrictions, the runtime for the game ends up being short, and the game doesn’t have much “depth” to it. BUT that doesn’t make it a bad game. If done right, these 1000 word games can be a fun and entertaining experience, and this game is just that.

The game is made in Ren’Py so it’s got most of your basic visual novel options: History log, backstep, Skip text, plenty of save slots, text speed, audio settings, auto, save/load, and quick save/load.

Achievements

The achievements are very easy to get. There are 6 endings and you just need to save and load and go through the choices a few times to get them (or look up a guide to follow). There are multiple ways to get some of the endings, so it makes it easy. I did have a slight issue with some achievements not popping up right away when I got the ending, but reloading and skipping through to the ending again made it pop. You can also go down one of the other paths that has basically the same ending and the achievement would probably pop there as well. 

There are 7 achievements total, one for each ending and another for doing an extra action during the choice-making. This was the only achievement I had to look at the guide for, mostly because I lost track of what paths I had already gone down at that point.

Unfortunately, the achievements can’t be shown on your profile page (at this time of writing), because of the profile limited feature assigned to the game. I don’t know how it works for full free games with no in-game purchases, but I do hope that one day this restriction will be lifted for the game. I’d love to display it on my profile.

My Thoughts

I can’t go much in depth of the story, mostly because there isn’t much to it and what there is, would just spoil the entire game. I ended up really enjoying this game though, and it took me about 23 minutes to 100% complete it. There are a few choices to make that lead you down different endings. I will say that normally there is always a choice in games that I can kind of align myself with on choosing, but this game does not have one of those. So I had to choose one of the options that most felt like something I would make. Honestly though, the choices were kind of silly, but also made the main character seem like a bit of a terrible person if you chose the rougher ones. I’m sorry Jester for telling you to shut up 😅

The voice actor did a great job. He sounded like a goofy jester and hit all the voice lines very well. Art is subjective to each person, but I personally enjoy Anta’s art-style and it fits very well for this game. Since pretty much all other parts of the game are assets, I won’t really comment on them…except; The sounds were chosen well, although the constant clip-clopping of the horse drove me a bit mad, so I did turn that down a bit. No fault of the dev, just circumstance since that’s where the environment takes place for the whole play through and repetitive noises tend to crawl under my skin.

Conclusion

The game is a fun time, if you’re looking for something short and sweet to play. It had me laughing and curious to know more about Jester and the main character. I hope that one day we can maybe see a bit of a longer game to learn more of the characters and have the world fleshed out a bit. It’d be awesome if that became the case. 

If you’re looking for something to play next, I highly recommend this game. Especially for a free game you can finish in less than 30 minutes that has many different language options.

Review also posted on Steam ➞

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