Once Upon a Jester

Genre: Visual Novel / Graphic Adventure

Players: 1

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Review:

Once Upon a Jester, released in 2022 on PC and Nintendo Switch and ported in 2025 to Xbox Series X|S, is a family-friendly game that’s hard to pin to a genre but I’d say it fits somewhere within the Visual Novel and Graphic Adventure area. This game puts you in the role of Jester, a thief who hears about a stage play contest that could give him the opportunity to steal the royal diamond, and along with his thieving buddy Sok, resolves to become a theater troupe successful enough to win the contest and steal the valuable jewel.

The presentation here uses extremely simple 2D characters and backgrounds seemingly made out of construction paper. This is backed by what is mostly whimsical instrumental music, however sometimes during the story characters will break out into a brief song, and this can be highly amusing, especially when someone is singing about a bizarre choice of topic, such as For Bettely Beth, where the mayor interrupts you to sing for a half a minute about his lost love. The music here is catchy, but it’s often brief like this, where it’s like the singer gives up a fraction of the way into the song, leaving you bewildered afterward.

This is joined by some excellent writing and amusing voice work for all the game’s characters. The characters all have a pretty thick accent (as developer Bonte Avond is Dutch, I assume that’s what I’m hearing), but honestly these thick accents add to the sort of makeshift improvised nature of the game, full of characters who are fixated on their own bizarre corners of the world and no one really knows what they’re doing. To put things into perspective, the rival theater troupe you’re competing against is a guy with a goat.

The gameplay here generally cycles between day and night sections, with in-game cutscenes interspersed between. During the day, you’re walking around town eavesdropping on local townsfolk to get an inkling what sort of performance everyone is craving today – their speech bubbles show symbols that can indicate what they do and don’t like at the moment. You follow this by using stickers to make a poster to fit the theme you intend to present in that evening’s play.

Once night falls, you’ll be performing, with Jester stopping every few lines to puzzle over what to say next, with each option corresponding to one of the aforementioned genres. Sometimes this will lead to a simple QTE-style minigame where you try to press or hold a button within a meter. And after you do this for a little bit, your performance will be rated by the audience based on how well you fit the themes they were craving and how well you performed in the minigames.

There’s nothing here very challenging – the minigames are very simple, and it’s not hard to figure out what genres the townsfolk like and dislike and stick to that. But I would argue that this game isn’t about challenge or puzzle-solving, it’s about seeing silly characters put on silly stage plays for silly townsfolk.

However, while I won’t judge this game too harshly for a lack of complexity or difficulty, there are a few issues that caused a great deal of frustration that I can’t let slide. First, your movement speed is painfully slow, with no run button. And second, the menus for creating your poster are awkward and needlessly confusing.

While there are definitely issues with the gameplay in Once Upon a Jester, and players craving a challenge aren’t going to find one, this is still a delightfully silly game with some really funny moments and tons of charm. If that sounds like something that interests you, I definitely think this is worth a look.

tl;dr – Once Upon a Jester is a game that’s somewhere between a Graphic Adventure and Visual Novel that puts you in the role of a thief working with his partner to put on stage plays to try to scam their way into the royal castle for a heist. There’s little challenge to be found here, and the gameplay has some irritating issues, but overall this is a charming and funny tale worth a look for anyone who enjoys silly stories.

Grade: B-

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