An interesting premise with poor execution.
Jessika begins with you as a detective and Jessika has committed suicide, but her father contacts you and wants to find out why she did it. So, it starts as an interesting concept with potential. Although it just ends up being about shock factor and plotlines that are quite bad. The story tackles heavy themes like abuse and racism. Yet it never compelled me to care more or try to relate to the story. The actress for Jessika was quite good giving a believable performance.
How we figure out the story is through videos Jessika has left behind. We put in keywords and videos around those keywords will appear. However, it doesn’t feel like a detective game with such a simple premise. Not only that but some of the keywords are quite awkward to find especially at first as you’re just guessing. You do this all from a desk looking at a laptop, which would have been better if the screen acted as yours but the frame of the laptop is still there.
You will get messages from co-workers and random emails as you’re figuring out what happened to Jessika. It often breaks the pacing and kills the tension that was building up when a co-worker tells you how great their ramen is while you try to figure out a suicide case.
After finding the videos, it’s painfully boring most of the time listening to Jessika. A lot of her stories are uninteresting and then some are very radical, which I can only assume is for a shock factor. The translation is pretty bad for it as well. Randomly words will be misspelled and the subtitles tend to be ahead of Jessika’s voice. It just comes across lazy particularly with a game so story focused.
Jessika was a disappointing attempt at an interesting concept with poor plot lines, translations being messy, and getting messages that just ruin the pacing of the story. Overall Jessika is a poor game that really could have done something decent with a better story or dialogue.
