When I first saw "No action Jackson" I expected it to be easy and a bit annoying because of its plot, centred around a hapless teenager whose life revolves around fantasy games. But five minutes into it, I was suitably impressed. The puzzles were quite hard and kept me workably frustrated at times but slowly you figure small bits on your way to keep you attentive. One of the earliest puzzle is how to get out of the house. You are only presented with two or three rooms so you'd imagine it would be easy to figure it out, but it's not at all.
As you only have two or three inventory items I tended to resort to the "try everything with everything" game plan.
The graphics were brilliant, especially as this has been made independently. It had a cartoonish feel to it and the characters were well drawn. The music score was quite poor, though, but the background "beat" is what you may imagine a teenager would walk about to. It's literally like you're in his head. Certain graphics were mildly amusing, like the drool on his pillow, or the dirty blanket he sleeps under.
I would liken this game to cartoon style games, such as Day of the tentacle, or Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, both games I deeply love. The interface is the classic,
"look at", "walk to" etc, that you'd see in Monkey Island style games. It's certainly not at all difficult to navigate or do things. You can't die either!! Which is something I have always personally felt more comfortable with, there’s nothing worse than navigating your way around, solving things, then having to reload because of sudden deaths. Sudden deaths should definitely be kept to action games and not point and click adventures.
There are a few bugs, but nothing particularly serious. You can only save once, which is annoying, but workable.
Once you have escaped you are expected to "rescue" his friends. The other characters often have quite amusing anecdotes. I particularly enjoyed his rickety grandfather. Overall the game play was smooth, the concept was unique and interesting. For a short while you truly get the full experience of been a male geek! His obsession with D+D is also quite funny, when he drops it into real life "time for some hack and slash action". His mother; "Time to spend some time in the real world, with your real family!". From that clever point onwards we're obviously sided with Jackson as reality escapees ourselves :). For an amateur game, this was brilliant. I'd buy it in a store.
