Check Out The Animation In Jenny LeClue's Pitch Video
Solve the mystery.
If there's one genre that isn't struggling for female lead characters, it's the adventure game. A billion grimy murder mysteries with a tough female cop have come out over the last decade (almost all of them dreadful). In complete contrast to those grim, glum affairs is the potential of Jenny LeClue, a bright, animated and distinctive Kickstarter pitch from animator Joe Russ. Promising to explore themes such as family, loss, and identity, and already showing off some seriously excellent animation, it too is a murder mystery. Just without the grime.
Here's the rather enticing pitch video:
The game promises "choose your own adventure", but I think it also intends to have point-n-click elements too. Each scene will be, Russ says, elaborately detailed, such that poking around at background details will reap responses, and clicking on details during dialogue scenes could gain you further clues or insight. The main thing is, it just looks gorgeous.
As is too often the case with Kickstarters, I felt like I had to do a lot of reading and picking to attempt to figure out what was actually being funded here, and am not sure I got too far. The pitch seems to be for a trilogy of episodic adventures, but the $65,000 goal is perhaps just for the first one - so far as I'm able to guess. Or it might be that they'll expand it to three parts if they make enough. But it's not clear what "enough" might be. I also appreciate the challenge, and the extreme unlikelihood of a game of this nature from an unknown developer reaching a goal closer to $150,000. Ideally, I suppose, the profits from the first chapter would go to funding later ones. I don't know. I just wish more Kickstarter pitches would make such things clear.
Edit: Things have been clarified now - the funding is for the first episode of the three.
It's already raised over $23.5k, but still has a fair way to go to reach the $65k target. However, there are still over three weeks in which to do it. I think a nice clear update about what the $65k is paying for will help it receive a lot more immediate contributions - just a watch of that pitch video content was enough to have me reaching for my Amazon wallet.