Jazz and Faust is an exciting adventure game that unfolds in the mysterious and dangerous world of the Ancient East. Unlike other adventure titles, Jazz and Faust is more than just your typical adventure resulting in the completion of a preset mission. It represents a well-balanced combination of strong storyline, high-quality 3D graphics and sound and goes on to offer two distinct paths, each offering dozens of nonlinear quests set in a heady and intense atmosphere of ancient ports, stuffy tea-houses and dingy caravans.

In Jazz and Faust you have the unique opportunity to look at the same events with a different pair of eyes. The effect results from constant contiguity of two linear plots, which you live through in the course of gameplay representing one of the two main characters - Jazz or Faust. Jazz and Faust will run into each other throughout the game, separate after a while and follow their own lines, but in the end come to the same final end game. Different personalities and life objectives of the two heroes result in a feeling that you are playing a completely new game when you start it anew with another character.

In the beginning you will have to choose which character you will start playing first. There is a world of difference between the personalities of the two characters. Jazz (a smuggler) is a representative of the world where cupidity is the driving force of life. He constantly finds himself involved in all sorts of risky undertakings, which frequently result in failure. Faust comes from the country on the other side of the sea. He is a captain of his own ship and is always busy with work that doesn't prevent him from dreaming idly. He considers the world an object of contemplation, not a source of filthy lucre.

Having chosen your main character, you may not change to the other while playing the game, but you may meet the other character occasionally and help him overcome a variety of complicated and dangerous adventures. Playing either Jazz or Faust you will be constantly confronted with the need to unravel a variety of unusual and challenging tasks, frequently finding yourself in unexpected situations. In addition, there are about 50 NPCs in the game for you to interact with.

By modern adventure game standards, Jazz and Faust is pretty weak on interaction. The amazing backgrounds are alive with detail, but your ability to LOOK or PICK-UP an object is strictly limited to the confines of the game’s script. You will spend much of the game moving the mouse around waiting for the cursor to change in hopes you can actually DO something.

Conversations are limited. You have no conversation menus, meaning you can only talk about certain things based on previous actions and any internal programming flags you may have triggered. Your goals are never well defined, so you spend a lot of time walking around not quite sure what you should be doing or how to do it.

Puzzles range from the totally obvious to the total obscure. This is partly due to the game design. Example: You can talk to the merchant, but you can’t buy anything until you have found somebody who needs something. This means you will be doing a lot of backtracking as you try to complete the various sub-quests in this game.

Some effects seem to be inconsistent. Torches in the police station create ripple effects from the heat, but torches in the tavern do not. The lighting effects are great, and you will see golden rays of light cascading through doors and windows creating realistic shadows as you move through it.

The first thing I noticed was the stark contrast between the 3D characters and the 2D backgrounds. The game plays at a fixed resolution (800x600 I believe) and everything that isn’t part of the painted background suffers from a bad case of “jaggies”.

One of the worst examples was going to the pier and seeing the large ship rocking on the waves. All of the rigging was just a bunch of jaggy, heavy, dotted lines. Using the built-in smoothing effects helped a bit, but not enough, and when I tried using the FSAA effects built into my GeForce 3 Ti500 video card all the characters disappeared from the screen.

The interface is a bit clumsy which surprised me for how simple it is. You can call up the inventory screen by right-clicking then you have to click through your inventory items to make one item active. It will appear in the lower corner then you can try using that item with people or other objects.

And perhaps my biggest complaint about the visuals was the terrible font used for all the text in this game. The default text is thick and very jagged and nearly impossible to read. Thankfully, the font is a standard TTF file that you can find in your install directory. I quickly renamed that file and copied over the ARIAL font from my Windows font directly. After renaming it to “jazz.ttf”, I reloaded the game and everything was much better. Feel free to experiment with any font you like, but I recommend keeping it simple.

The dialog ranges from amateurish to downright horrible, not only in acting quality but in the script itself. The first time I played this game I picked Faust. As I watched the opening movie and heard the interaction of the characters I couldn’t believe my ears. I even restarted the sequence and had someone else listen. We both agreed – terrible!

It sounded like somebody was handed a script, they started reading, and the sound engineers used their first take. Not only were the lines being delivered in a non-rhythmic monotone voice; the words they were speaking were simplistic and not suitable to the time period. It was as if a 5th grader was rewriting Shakespeare for a school play and 3rd graders were doing the acting.

I tried playing as Jazz and found the dialog in his part of the game was significantly better, but there were still several characters that spoke with little or no emotion while others seems to rush through huge chunks of dialog without ever stopping for commas, periods, or to even breathe.

I’m not sure exactly who or what is responsible for such terrible acting or script writing. I’ve played my fair share of import titles, and know that games that originate overseas don’t always translate well during the localization process. Just be warned that if you plan on enjoying this adventure game you are going to have to tolerate some really bad acting.

I’m sure it’s tough to establish your company in a foreign market, and anything less than a stellar title is going to be overlooked by the mainstream gaming audience. 1C certainly targeted the right genre. Everyone has been waiting for another great adventure game ever since The Longest Journey. Unfortunately, Jazz and Faust is not that next great adventure game, and unless you are really starved for such a game you will probably want to think seriously before purchasing this title.