Review – Cricket: Jae’s Really Peculiar Game

Our main character is Jae, who is living by himself in a small town. His sister is away at college and presumably taking care of bills and such through means we don’t know, and his mother is very much dead. You know she’s dead because Cricket takes pains to make sure they remind you of this about every fifteen minutes or so. Jae would like to just wallow in his misery and live a quiet life, but his best friend, Zack, insists they go together to pick up flowers from the local shop to bestow on Jae’s mother’s grave. This single act sparks a wildly tangenting quest of exploration, friendship and self-discovery/loathing that literally goes to the stars.

I need to forewarn the reader: Cricket is not a happy game. As much as I want to pretend otherwise and as much as the crafting of the visuals and jokes might confuse you, there is an inherent lack of joy in this game. There is a lot about Cricket that I will touch upon and really praise, and even parts that I’m a bit more lukewarm towards but will still give credit. However, I have to take a bit of a hard stance about the tonality and the visual disassociation that comes with this title. The Steam page uses words like “heartwarming,” “wacky” and “irreverent” to describe aspects of the game, but “depressing,” “nihilistic” and “hopeless” never make it into the mix, though I suppose one is better advertising than the other.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Cricket is a clever JRPG that pulls elements from multiple games of the past, most notably Earthbound and Paper Mario. You have a primary party of three that also includes a bench of characters you encounter throughout who can be swapped into the main party at any time outside of combat. When walking around, you’ll always see what are considered the three “main” characters of Jae, Zack and Symphony, along with a fourth of whomever you put in your party, though occasionally a fifth will join for certain sections. Enemies spawn everywhere outside of safe zones (and occasionally inside), treasures can be found in cookie tins that eventually hold sewing supplies, and experience points (as well as friendship bonds) grow irrelevant of the party members. That is to say, everyone gains and advances regardless of combat experience, so don’t worry about unbalanced party members.

The three greatest things about Cricket are the visuals, the music and the combat, bar none. I have to deeply commend Studio Kumiho for the crafting of the world and the sprites that make up Jae’s world. There’s a wonderful amount of detail not only in how things look (different houses, trees, landscapes and objects), but in the animation itself. I was always delighted by the different ways the local birds look when they fly away at my approach, even when those birds were actually rats with wings (not bats, like real rats with wings). The animation is gorgeous in moving around and in combat, so it never loses its cartoonish appeal regardless of whatever else is going on. The concept is exceedingly well done, and I’m saying that on the Nintendo Switch, inarguably the weakest system to host this game.

Symphony as “the friend who values the group more than she can really say.”

And the enemies! This could have been something that was awash in a lot of “same enemies but different color schemes” type of game, but the sheer number of zoological oddities that pepper the map make it worth getting into fights (and plenty on that later). It wasn’t enough just to have squirrels in berets and seagulls shaped like rockets: we also have mosh pit headbangers, bizarre little robots, the manifestation of self-hatred and Bunny Bees, my new favorite enemy to come out of a game. The creatures match the biomes as well, so nothing feels out of place and the sort of “of COURSE” sensation comes every time I encountered something new to fight.

The characters themselves are also delightful in expression and tonality. While I have a particular affinity for the facials of Twila and Acacia, I can’t dispute that a lot of detail went into giving everyone a full range of reactions and concepts from their in battle display and their portraits during expositional moments. There’s a good amount of variety in their backgrounds, visually, so you really get that impression of a gathering of children from all different walks of life rather than the same kind of person just cropping up in multiple locations across the map. It’s compelling and really grabs you every time you turn a corner.

My exact reaction the first time I ordered a KFC Double Down.

The music of Cricket is also a smorgasbord of inspiration, and Shane Mesa should be incredibly proud of their work in this game. From the ambient tones of moving around a small town to the discordant aural attacks that make up the cursed Straw Town, players are constantly entreated to experiments in orchestral-adjacent tracks or electronic mayhem. The boss fight music, interestingly, always felt different but never distinctly “boss” based. For example, when I had my throwdown with Cheese the Great Beast, the music was such a driving track that I got into the groove of combat without ever truly feeling like “oh no, this is a boss and I need to focus.” It gave me more enemy as a marathon than a sprint, if that makes sense.

Sadly, the music does stand in sharp conflict with the voice clips dropped in. Rather than be even partially voiced, Cricket: Jae’s Really Peculiar Game instead has each character yelling something at the beginning of speaking, and not even all the time. It’s usually just little bits, like “All right!” or “Yeah!,” but there’s no rhyme or reason for it. For example, at one point I talked to Acacia, and she distinctly was telling me “go away, I have to do something,” but her voice clip was “Come here!” If you’re not going to have the characters speak the words on the screen, maybe put a little more care into what sound vaults they can dip into when starting a sentence?

At this point, I want to point out that Cricket also suffers from some technical issues on the Switch, which is a bit of a rarity for me when it comes to Nintendo gaming. Most of my seven years with the Switch have been pretty incident free, so it was bizarre to have more than one thing happen. Game glitching so I can just walk through technically inaccessible areas: odd, but not game breaking. My character suddenly disappearing in the middle of a fight: threw off my fight timing, making it a bit difficult. Game straight up erroring and making me lose anything after the last time I saved? Deeply annoying, especially when save points are surprisingly few and far between. This is all stuff that can hopefully be patched with last minute QA, but I’m surprised it existed at all.

No, we’re not crowd surfing, we just glitched through needing to part the people.

The combat is a delight to get down, and it’s also crucial to surviving the game in any real capacity. Timing based, players can easily overpower foes and almost totally negate incoming damage by getting good at timers. The A button is helpful, but the B button makes every attack worth the risk/reward of getting the timing down. Combat are further helped along by the Tide Bar, which functions as both a power increase to attacks and a slo-mo to help along blocking from enemies. The Tide Bar fills with well timed attacks and blocks, but the enemy ALSO has a Tide Bar that they fill themselves and can use to execute much stronger hits. It’s incredibly well done and made it worthwhile in a game where equipment exists but feels exceedingly few and far between in terms of obtainment. 

And I’m glad the combat is good, because it’s a feast or famine situation. Cricket: Jae’s Really Peculiar Game has the most liberal spawn policy imaginable, often making enemies reappear the second their spawn point goes off screen, so getting lost and backtracking can lead to almost neverending fights. There’s a point where you traverse through a mountain range, and the sheer volume of foes just showing up again and again made me grateful that this game isn’t random encounter based, but shows you the enemies on the map and gives you a chance to avoid them. It wasn’t always perfect, but I got good at running and weaving, and then feeling affirmed when I still could stomp in the next fight in which I participated.

The combat is only further boosted by what I have dubbed the Mischief Meter. As you wander into towns, you have a chance to be an absolute pest to the locals. Hurl trash cans at them, ram into them, even just talk to them but then walk away before they finish their thought. This increases a devilish meter that also pumps up the strength and EXP rewards from fights in the field. For the love of all that is holy, PLEASE make sure you’re scaling this safely, because the meter is no joke. I maxed it out in one town, couldn’t enter any more shops, and then got beaten to death by a bunch of shark gangsters in a sewer. It’s a good system, and it’s going to bite you if you abuse it.

Three children fight the manifestation of a biracial child’s sense of not belonging. Oh, a traffic cone! How whimsical!

To recap for those of you who’ve made it this far: Cricket looks and sounds amazing. Character design is on point, enemies are wonderful, environment is varied and in-depth. Voice drops are weird and a bit discordant but not a deal breaker. Glitches occur at a rate a bit surprising for the Switch, but I never had to give up playing. Combat is rewarding and satisfying, though experience is spread throughout the team so no one gets left behind. Oh, and the number of items you find in the wild concerning healing for both magic and HP is plentiful, cheap enough to find at stores/vending machines and you also get healed up when you level up, so Jae’s own healing powers are nice to have but not enough to force him to be a part of the regular combat team. So what’s left? What’s stuck in my craw that makes this review take a turn?

The sadness and how the sadness is handled in Cricket: Jae’s Really Peculiar Game completely turns me off from wanting to know more about it. Every single character who matters in this game – Jae, Zack, Twila, Charlie, Acacia and Symphony, not to mention people I haven’t met yet – wear their pain on their sleeves. Jae’s mom was taken by cancer and he’s never known his father, and the recurring nightmares about losing her visit him often. Zack buries his emotions about his father abandoning his family through a jocular veneer and boxing tournaments, probably as an outlet for his rage. Charlie is nonbinary and is ignored by her parents wholly, despite her burgeoning genius. Twila is bullied mercilessly by others because she’s mixed race and never feels like she fits in. There’s more and more, and it never stops coming.

Generational trauma is an explanation, not an excuse.

I use Actual Sunlight as a touchstone game from time to time because it’s utterly hopeless and depressing on purpose. It never pretends to be anything it isn’t, and the perspective it casts on suicidal depression is stark and awful, but also deliberate. You don’t enter into the game with the intent that things will magically feel better or there’s a “good ending” to unlock. There are fleeting moments of grim humor throughout, but that’s because it’s meant to showcase how depression can masquerade as being fine even when someone who’s suffering might be seconds away from a drastic, irreversible decision.

With Cricket, the pendulum of tonal shift is erratic and unpredictable, causing you to not be able to enjoy the comedy as much as you’d like to. There are so many silly moments and great puns from the get-go, and there are running jokes that reoccur at just the right frequency. I like the one-off quips from NPCs in the different town areas, and I hope that we see more from Wally as the game progresses because he’s a fun foil to throw against the wall for slapstick nonsense. There’s enough conversational banter that makes me like the characters when they are being likable.

I get that players are not supposed to like Acacia, and that’s so apparent it might as well be a tattoo on her forehead. A sarcastic and pessimistic character whose parents are always fighting, she then takes her negativity out on the party at every opportunity, especially Jae. Yet the turn for Acacia to become a sympathetic character must be much later in the game, because she is not only unpleasant, she is downright cruel in her tone and actions. Not only are the things she says absolutely destructive to anyone feeling insecure, the game conveys that in a massive way with a drop in music, screen shaking and a faint sting of tinnitus growing stronger as the pressure and anxiety floods both the character and the character. It makes it so hard to want to keep playing because this seems to exist as a possibility anytime anyone says anything.

Weridly, these constant plot dreams of crushing sadness were MUCH easier to deal with.

Also, in that same vein, all of this sadness and legitimate hurt isn’t done in a clever or roundabout way. When you play Yume Nikki, it takes a little time for the realization of the deeper story elements to dawn on you and you have a great “oh NO” moment when it all hits. In comparison, Cricket loves to beat you about the head and shoulders with everything in real time, forcing you to absorb the JRPG equivalent of a trauma dump. If you met someone on the first day of school and they said “My name is Bobby and my father beats me to deal with his own sense of failure,” it would be REALLY hard to connect with that kid on a personal level than if this information came out after getting to know him and then he confided in you.

While the disclaimer at the beginning of Cricket does a banger job of capturing exactly how dark things can get, as a reviewer I have a hard time gauging if the disclaimer is simply enough given the trajectory of the game. There are so many topics that are covered in a very short amount of time, but they’re fired at you in rapid succession with only the most surface attempts to assuage what it means for the characters involved. Of course these kids will still be friends, none of the damage they have suffered has come at anyone else’s hands. But the scope of my review and how most people will experience the game (playing it for several hours and gradually just adding more bad feelings) means asking a LOT from the player to “just bear with us” in hopes that it gets better.

Which is why Acacia’s constant fixation on assigning the emotional weight of certain characters onto other character’s plates is so awful to behold. If you have a friend like this – someone who has been hurt and makes it their mission to “be real” and tell you what a bad friend you are without any attempts to guide you in the right direction – then you might be me twenty years ago, and you no longer speak to that person in any capacity. I also understand that there will be people who identify with the different characters  but I just don’t think that the way everyone is presented feels natural to digest. Only Symphony felt like the right tone of character because she is purposely holding back something, and that’s the mystery that I want to experience with a game that is looking to strike an emotional chord.

An important message delivered after the player and Jae just sort of sit with the sense of utter failure for a while.

The ironic twist in everything is my adoration of Cricket: Jae’s Really Peculiar Game is why I rail so hard against what I don’t like about it. The formula is there, the elements are there, the look and feel and even the story which feels lifted from folklore is THERE, and the decision to laden so much grief and hurt and anger into such a short period of time sours the whole meal. Even if I play to the finale and find the ends justifies the means, I’m still left here, at this moment, with how I feel and how it affects the overall experience. I’m not saying that it’s bad, but I’m saying it hurts, and not the way the developers may have intended.

Yes, there is a disclaimer at the beginning of Cricket that warns you, but it’s also couched in promises of serious subjects being done in a lighthearted way. This is my warning to you: plenty of moments are not done lightheartedly. Plenty are done in a borderline bleak fashion, so be aware. There’s so much potential, so steel yourself if you plan to try it. I hope Jae’s quest leads exactly where he wants to go, because I never foresaw the path paved with so much pain.

Cricket: Jae’s Really Peculiar Game is available now on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series S/X, PC and Switch.

Reviewed on Switch.

A copy of Cricket: Jae’s Really Peculiar Game was provided by the publisher.

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