Reviews VideoGame / Jazzpunk

A shockingly refined bizarre comedy experience.

This game was introduced to me way back when in Let's Plays, and I've wanted to own and play it ever since.

What I loved first about Jazzpunk was its comedy. Simply put, the game is always throwing something silly, surreal, surprising, or referential at you wherever you turn, and there are some fantastic gags and otherwise memorably strange scenes. The player's limbs being paper cutouts on sticks, physics taking a holiday, extremely dark and cruel jokes, and a Shout-Out of almost any kind...it's a great experience.

The game also has an incredibly strong aesthetic identity, and I'd even call it artistic. The game indulges in a strange blend of retro-futurist 1950s aesthetics and modern cyberpunk, all packaged within a very silly spy narrative, and visually and thematically coalesces very nicely into a spot-on pastiche with a minimalist yet authentic art style. The characters all look like bathroom door icons, but they work perfectly for the retro art style and surrealism. I love the tone and its realization.

Jazzpunk is a game built on exploration and has no consequence or real challenge, which is perfectly fine. There are cases, however, where it feels like some exploration wasn't rewarded well enough, like NPCs with the same dialogue in multiple locations or repeated interactions or gags where it felt like more unique gags would have been expected. For example, you can get a master key to a hotel's rooms, but each floor has the same mix of scenes inside the rooms until you find the scene that destroys the key. This kind of thing feels disappointing. In that case, each room felt like a promise of a different surprise, and there were a few other spots where it felt like jokes could have been present or more varied.

In the end, this game is fantastically weird and has a far more developed identity than it has any right to. It truly makes jazzpunk feel like its own genre- and that genre is surreal, clever and surprising.