Jack The Ripper

List Price: $19.99 Discount Price: $8.48

Features:

• A thrilling investigative experience with the illusive and deadly Jack the Ripper
• Exploration, inventory-based gameplay with a suspenseful storyline
• A mass-appeal theme based on true historical events
• Virtools Engine allows for special effects and detailed graphics
• Numerous puzzles of varying complexity--environmental, tactile, auditory

Accessories:
PC Gamer (1-year)	Games for Windows: The Official Magazine

Customer Reviews:

Dead End [Posted on 2006-01-12]
At the beginning of this game you feel like you're really going to solve a mystery but in places it gets really tedious and leaves a cliff hanger at the end. I don't recommend this game, save your money for something like Syberia or Tomb Raider.

The Adventure Company Drops the Ball [Posted on 2006-06-11]
The Adventure Company has a knack for taking high concepts and making them into terrible games. Take for example "The Mystery of the Mummy", a Sherlock Holmes mystery game that made the world's most famous detective seem insipid. As lousy as some of their attempts have been in the past, high concepts keep players coming back to The Adventure Company. "Jack the Ripper" has a concept so ideal it seems impossible to ruin, and yet the game is phenomenally atrocious.

The game is set in New York City in 1901. A couple of poverty-stricken showgirls have been murdered in a fashion similar to the Jack the Ripper killings of 1888. Jimmy Palmer, a nave young reporter, is assigned by his editor to write a series of newspaper articles on the killings. As Jimmy looks into the murders, he discovers that the same serial killer might be responsible for both the 1888 and 1901 murders. There's the high concept. The game play is from the first-person perspective of Jimmy from beginning to end. It consists of returning to the same locations and talking to the same people repeatedly, using dialogue options that aren't really all that optional. Occasionally, Jimmy can collect items such as keys and money to appease stubborn suspects. There are only one or two actual puzzles in the entire game.

The game parades many characters based loosely on actual suspects in the real-life Jack the Ripper murders, but Jimmy never seems to come any closer to solving the mystery. A game called "Jack the Ripper" should at least guarantee a creepy ambience, and the game seems to succeed in that area initially, but it soon becomes apparent that ambience isn't enough. Menacing footsteps when no one is following you, whispered dialogue that is unintelligible and unimportant to the storyline, and shady characters that can't be interacted with and don't contribute anything to the plot become annoying after a short while. In one room, a hushed, secretive whisper resembling "I can sell you the most beautiful radishes" can be heard repeatedly. Dark, blood-stained alleys lose their creepiness after a while. The score is beautiful and unnerving, but it only adds to the misleading feeling that something frightening is going to happen, and it hardly ever does. There are also several moments in the game where Jimmy appears to have a psychic connection with a raven, leading to trippy graphic sequence with no pay-off.

Many critics have noted the series of Irish folk tunes performed by one of the game's characters as a bright spot. The songs themselves are beautiful and haunting, like the game's score, but the animated performances that accompany them are less varied and more mechanical than a floorshow at Chuck E. Cheese's. Also, be warned that there isn't a twist ending, just an anticlimactic one. Maybe someday still The Adventure Company will redeem itself. In the meantime, avoid this game.

I beg to differ on the horrible reviews [Posted on 2006-12-11]
Okay, so I admit that I am not the most PC game savvy and for this reason, I enjoyed this game. It is very similar to Post Mortem and Still Life (not surprising, as they are made by the same company). Yes, it is tedious and repetitive, but it is simple, puzzles are easy, the story is linear, you can't really screw up, and I appreciate this in a game! The graphics are pretty cool, as is the music.

I play adventure games to pretend I am really there, in the game, trying to figure out the mystery. I don't need shoot-em-ups or puzzles that take me all day to figure out. If you're like me, you'll probably enjoy this game. You just need to go into it knowing that you are not looking at an Oscar-caliber experience. Take it for what it's worth and you may just have some fun! :)

Not quite what I expected . . . [Posted on 2007-02-24]
For a while, I've been really interested in Jack the Ripper (and as Silkner says in this game "And serial killers in general"), but this just isn't as exciting as the actual murder cases. The slaughterhouse part was really creepy, though. Your boss in this game, Bur, really would've made a great killer, because you can just tell that he only cares about his job, and wants to see if The Daily to find a story as good as that. However, his face just doesn't match the actual Ripper's face. [..]But, then again, neither does it match in this game.

Dark and Seedy Game [Posted on 2007-07-24]
This game actually made some horror game lists - and for good reason. It's quite dark and scary. If you are interested in an adventure game that has a good story, some easy puzzles and solid voice acting at a good price this is your game.

The graphics in this game are functional and seedy with some nice rendered backgrounds and characters. The story line along with "puzzles" that fit into the story are quite good actually.

I myself usually play 3rd person adventure games but this game is on my top 10 best games along with ganes like Syberia and The Longest Journey.

The puzzles are very basic and easy to solve without using a walkthrough which was a real plus for me.

In my opinion, this game is what all adventure games should be - a great interactive story. I can recall not too long ago paying $59.99 for games exactly like this one - this game is a real bargin.

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