PAX East 2016 – Jenny LeClue, Hob, and I Am Setsuna

Jenny LeClue

Sometimes, all it takes is good art to get you sucked into a game, and if there’s any game that can do that, it’s Jenny LeClue. You take control of Jenny, a bespectacled detective that you honestly don’t learn much about in the demo. It’s a relatively standard point and click adventure game where you snoop for clues and try to solve a mystery. The demo has you sneaking about someone’s house trying to find some intel. The demo was only 10 minutes, which is a shame because that was just enough time to get to the main puzzle in the demo and stop playing.

Though we couldn’t play much at the show, we’re going to play the demo online and you should too.

Jenny LeClue is out later this year for PC, PS4, iOS, and Android.

Hob

Continuing the trend of visually beautiful games is Hob, a third person top down puzzle platformer. The game seems to have a story and character development, but it’s definitely slow building. The game features no dialog, no voice acting, and no text, just interacting with the environment. It’s a bold choice that doesn’t always pay off. For the duration of the demo, it was totally okay and had the effect of making the demo even more interesting and intriguing, but it may get old for a whole game. That being said, with the visual style of the game, there’s a good chance you’d be too busy looking at the environment to notice the lack of text.

Hob is coming soon to PS4 and PC.

I Am Setsuna

When Square Enix announced Tokyo RPG Factory as a dedicated developer for JRPGs, it was pretty exciting. Their first title, I Am Setsuna, was available for demo and so far, the game looks promising.

It has all the elements you’d expect from a JRPG — world map traversal with locations to explore, Chrono Trigger style enemies on the field that transition into battle, and tons of NPCs to interact with. That being said, the game is definitely rough around the edges. Tokyo RPG Factory really puts a statement out there and parts of this game just doesn’t live up to that. The music is okay, but not great. The demo showed off almost nothing comprehensible of the story, the battle mechanics weren’t terrifically interesting, just standard turn based combat, and the environments were kind of bland. It could just be that this doesn’t show well (most RPGs with the exception of Ni No Kuni don’t), and maybe the company’s name got the expectations up a bit too high, but this seems like a B+ RPG.

When the game fully releases in July of this year, we’ll see whether or not it was just PAX that made it look less good than it is, but at the moment, consider our excitement tempered.

I Am Setsuna is out July 19th for PS4, PS Vita, and PC.