Review | A Juggler's Tale - There Are No Strings on Me [Pumpkin Spice 2021]

A Juggler's Tale from developer Kaleidoscube is a play in five acts, accompanied by a medieval quartet and rhyming couplets. Wait, don't run off! And if you're into it, don't sit so close. 

In the vein of INSIDE and Little Nightmares, A Juggler's Tale is a 2.5D platformer from Europe about a sad little kid running through a dangerous world. The dark fairytale begins quite sweetly with a layered narrative, like a Wes Anderson movie, that puts us in a pub enjoying entertainment from an old puppeteer and his little theatre. He’s telling a story about Abby, a girl who performs with a travelling circus, and we play through her introduction performing tricks with a bear, throwing apples and winning over the crowd. Beginning on a stage with painted cutouts, you move from the staging area and enter a living landscape, with the backdrop of a lushly forested mountain region moving into autumn.

Ah what a beautiful and picturesque vie— Oh… That child is in a cage… Never mind.

The player puppet, and every other on-screen person and animal, move on strings in the ways marionettes will, and I'm impressed throughout by the physics-based animations - the jumps especially - which if you’ve played with these puppets is restricted, with arms up and head bowing down.

I leant you my toy on the condition YOU DIDN’T GET IT WET!

It is soon clear that, just as fairytales go, this is a darker story than it seems. Abby and the bear, Urs, are both locked in cages at night, and the story that follows is your escape from the sideshow, with the aid of rats and a host of other creatures, and entry into the dark forest. This is a treacherous journey, filled with stealth puzzle confrontations with hunters out to catch you at the behest of the circus. These are fun if slightly frustrating in a trial and error sort of way, however, these sections come with the bonus of having the occasional reminder that you are on strings, which get held back or tangled when trying to pass under certain things. It is the gameplay choice that most makes A Juggler’sTale feel distinct from the other games that it is leaning hard on the influence of. 

All of this comes with narration from the puppeteer himself, played with craggy excellence in the English voiceover by Shaun Lawton, who speaks mostly in rhyme. Rhyming couplets as narrative could kill a game dead if they were belaboured, but thankfully the writing and performance are able to match the true task of narrative poetry in feeling natural at least 90% of the time. What makes the tale stand out alongside this however is that the puppetry and poetry gimmick is not just a cute idea, but also important to the narrative, as it becomes not only a tale about a girl running from the circus, but a meta-story about the puppet struggling against the strings pulling her. 

Honestly, circus-bears make way better friends than people anyway.

As the game progresses it's clear in certain set-piece moments that Abby is being held against her will by the puppeteer too. He will sometimes get you across impossible leaps that he's set up only as a callus reminder that you need him, and all the time chides you about how escaping into the dangerous world is going to be too much to handle. This is an engaging way of making it into an even darker story, and working along the fairytale conventions of a fantasy becoming more and more grisly. Abby has to survive capture several times, climb dead bodies and defy the wishes of her master. 

The hunters close in, both the strings and our narrator's patience are stretched to breaking point and the lackadaisical tone of the game’s illustrated intro is gone. That's until the curtains close at the end of each act and we are removed back into the position of Abby's audience.

A Juggler’s Tales’ gameplay is a simple platformer mix of four actions with remappable controls, though there is no toggleable option for movement or sustained interactions. These interactions are indicated by ropes tied onto objects which can be changed in colour from red to blue or yellow, though these are sometimes too small or subtle an indicator. The game also starts with subtitles turned on, which are handily resizable, and are in ten languages, with the voiced narration being in English and German.

“You could say the gameplay gets a little tidied in knots!”

“….”

“Oooooh, tough crowd tonight…”

The things that bug me about the game are the bugs with its platforming, which will suffer from odd collisions, dialogue triggers that sometimes overlap, and multiple other small things. These may well be patched out, but leave behind that feeling of being inescapably 'first major release' that everything in the game has. This isn't necessarily bad, but is noticeable, most obviously in the opening cinematic which uses a digital artstyle that matches nothing else in the game's aesthetic and doesn’t gel. This game was clearly crafted on a lower budget than it really deserved for its aspirations, and I wonder whether A Juggler’s Tale will pick up the same interest or audience of the things it is trying to match did, and that if it does so it will be on the strings of fate and the word of mouth.

With a layered story and puzzles that are inventive and actually lead to something rewarding, beautiful backdrops of artfully lit mountain forest scenery, and a compellingly short playthrough time of around three hours, A Juggler's Tale deserves praise for just being kind of delightful. It is a game I can see people loving, I just hope they get the chance to see it.