Jennifer Wilde: Unlikely Revolutionaries PC Review

Jennifer Wilde: Unlikely Revolutionaries is a point-and-click adventure game from Outsider Games, and while it is a fairly standard point-and-click, in terms of item collection and chatting with various characters in the world, this game manages to stand out as an experimental artistic piece rather than your usual gaming fare.

The most immediate aspect of Jennifer Wilde: Unlikely Revolutionaries that stands out is the art style, so it would be worth discussing that first. The art style is a linework-oriented, black-and-white masterpiece. It is, by far, one of the prettiest games in terms of pure creative force.

 

Most games tend to go for more realistic graphics, but realism is simply an endless pursuit of reality rather than an interpretation of it. So, for all those who are into the more artsy sort of games, this one is definitely for you. The art style is also somewhat reminiscent of Lucas Pope’s Return of the Obra Dinn.

To accompany the art style, the game also has a jazzy score that plays throughout your time as Jennifer Chevalier as she investigates her way across Europe. The music sets the tone and general atmosphere of the whole thing to a tee. However, in terms of gameplay, Jennifer Wilde: Unlikely Revolutionaries has two interesting quirks that differentiate it from other point-and-click games.

In most point-and-click adventure games, you run around, look for items, chat with people, and solve whatever puzzles come your way. Jennifer Wilde: Unlikely Revolutionaries is essentially the same, but the differences come in the form of the notebook system and Oscar Wilde.

 

The notebook is your main means of solving the game’s puzzles, and it works like this. You receive images that are, essentially, items you discover by exploring the world and talking to people. These images are clues that allow you to piece together some events that you need to determine. It would be easiest to explain it through an example.

In the very first scene of Jennifer Wilde: Unlikely Revolutionaries, you’re in your apartment with some friends, and you need to find their misplaced clothes because someone is at the door and may not believe the reality that you have two semi-naked people in your house because you’re painting them. So, you chat to your friends to receive an image about how you were all drinking the night before, then you find some of the paintings you’ve been working on and discover that the clothes were in a certain place when you painted them, and so you deduce that they must have fallen off the perch they were on and dropped behind the couch. This particular example is obviously a very low-stakes kind of situation, but as a tutorial, it gets the idea across well enough.

 

You need to speak to people, interact with the environment, and try to figure out which image is which. Then, once you have all the images, you need to arrange them in the correct order to make them all fit. You’re literally piecing the story together with fragments. And sometimes, these images will be incomplete. For instance, you know a certain character was with someone, but that someone is an unknown. So, you eventually find a picture of the two characters together and you now know what the unknown one looks like.

This is the primary means of progression in Jennifer Wilde: Unlikely Revolutionaries. Finding clues that give you images and then piecing them together to form a coherent narrative of some kind. Ironically, it isn’t revolutionary, but it feels like something similar to how The Sexy Brutale allows you to piece various aspects of the story together to try and understand the whole narrative, albeit without the time manipulation mechanics of that particular game.

 

Jennifer Wilde: Unlikely Revolutionaries is not simply a detective-focused point-and-click, as the notebook mechanic would have you believe, because another aspect becomes apparent very early on in the story: the appearance of Oscar Wilde. Oscar Wilde, for those unfamiliar, was a playwright, poet, critic, and all-round quick-witted speaker who was effectively put on trial for being a gay man. And these aspects are only briefly mentioned, so you should not expect the game to be about him and his life, but you do not actually interact with Oscar Wilde as he was in life, but rather as a ghost.

Jennifer can somehow see and speak to ghosts, and Oscar Wilde is the ghost who tags along with her because she has a special magical locket that ties him to her. And this is where the second interesting aspect of the gameplay comes into focus. You can switch between these two characters in Jennifer Wilde: Unlikely Revolutionaries.

 

Each of the characters has their own specific talents. Jennifer is the one who can pick up items, learn clues, and talk to living people, but Oscar Wilde can pass through obstacles that Jennifer cannot, and he is able to learn information from ghosts that she cannot reach. He can also do things like see where she cannot see. A good example would be when Jennifer speaks to the investigator in charge of the murder she is investigating, and he does not allow her to see into the files he has, but Oscar can just step behind him and have a look.

This is, effectively, just a game that allows switching between two characters with different abilities, and that is not something necessarily new, but it does give Jennifer Wilde: Unlikely Revolutionaries an interesting difference to many other point-and-click games out there like the recent Like No Other: The Legend of the Twin Books.

However, Jennifer Wilde: Unlikely Revolutionaries is not a very polished experience. Sadly, the game doesn’t react how you’d expect it to react sometimes. For instance, there’s a dead character you need to speak to, but a cop is blocking the way to the ghost hovering over the corpse. So, you speak to the cop, but he will only let the family see the body.

 

Naturally, you send Oscar over, and he chats with the ghost, and the ghost mentions his name and surname. You now have a name! You would think that you can now go to the cop and say that you’re related and then give him the surname. But nope, you have to go to the police station, check the investigator’s file for the name of the specific family member, and then go back.

This kind of thing happens fairly frequently in Jennifer Wilde: Unlikely Revolutionaries. The solution makes sense, but the fact that the developers didn’t make any allotments, such as new dialogue, to make up for these gaps is a bit of an issue. It means that you can think you have a solution to an in-game puzzle, but instead of a solution, it just makes you frustratingly wander around while hoping that you stumble onto the actual solution.

 

However, Jennifer Wilde: Unlikely Revolutionaries is a great game for those who want some point-and-click adventuring inside a gorgeously realized art style with characters who often speak as if they’ve read too much Shakespeare at times. It also isn’t too long, at about four hours, but for the price tag, it’s quite easy to recommend it.
 

Justin van Huyssteen (@LC_Lupus)
Senior Editor, NoobFeed