This game has been sitting in my Steam library for nearly a decade, unfinished. I snagged it in an indie developer's bundle that I picked up primarily for another game. I started a Let's Play series on it back in 2013, but then life got in the way. My goal for 2023 is to clean up a lot of my backlog, and I started with
Jolly Rover. I remembered this cute, quirky point-and-click adventure. It's cute. It's quirky. It's point-and-click. My memory is better than I thought.
The graphics are actually pretty good, if you consider that it's a 13-year-old indie game. Simple things make all the difference here; for instance, Rover's tail wags as he digs in sand. The "tingling sensation" is depicted by varying colors of tiny skulls, depending on the voodoo used. It's a neat effect.
The sound is okay. The voice acting is fairly decent, but definitely not professional quality. I did my final playthrough to get all the achievements on mute, to be honest. The sound effects are cute and fit the game perfectly. There's not much in the way of music, and you can play the game completely muted with no issues. As a hearing person who works with the Deaf/Hard of Hearing community, I feel this should be noted: the game is deaf-friendly!
Controls are simple: point, click. This works well for the game, though I feel like maybe the keyboard could've been utilized for entering the voodoo sequences the first time around. Either way, it's not too bad. Most of the playing comes in exploring (clicking on random things) and sometimes combining those random things with other things. To unlock all the achievements, you'll need to find all flag pieces (I believe there are 12 or 16), all pieces of eight (24) and all crackers (90, or 30 sets of 3). Collectibles are my jam, so I had fun.
For the money I spent on the game (the bundle was $10, I think, for six games), I got more than my money's worth of entertainment. Three playthroughs took me approximately 12 hours, with two of those being "completionist" runs. The only reason the third playthrough was even necessary is because I missed a set of crackers during the second one. I would definitely consider another Brawsome game if one were to catch my eye.
4.0