The Perfect Jury
A downloadable game for Windows and macOS
The Perfect Jury is a visual novel in which you take facts from sources and use them to build narratives. Sources, from print media and scientific journals to social media and leaked documents, are divided into pieces of information, called facts, which can be highlighted, ignored, and reorganized according to your personal beliefs. In The Perfect Jury, narratives don't just convey opinions, they convey truth - as well as lies.
FEATURES
- You control the narrative. In The Perfect Jury, narrative-building isn't a simple matter of taking sides, it's about identifying the points that matter, bringing nuance and understanding to chaotic, divisive situations.
- You control the conversation. Games which stress the importance of player choice often reduce meaningful decisions down to simple and infrequent multiple-choice questions, while other actions are ultimately more or less irrelevant. By letting you speak at any time by default, The Perfect Jury lets you decide what decisions are or are not important.
- Defend your views. This is a game which doesn't value opinions for their own sake. Good opinions reflect a general understanding of a given subject matter. You, along with the other characters, will challenge each other to demonstrate the quality of your opinions.
- Deep sources. To develop your opinions, you'll work through a variety of multi-faceted source materials, which can analyzed to complete your understanding of the subject, or picked apart to spin a narrative.
- Real characters. Entertainment media which focuses on politics has a tendency to invent characters to personify viewpoints and ideologies. The Perfect Jury isn't just about politics, it's about the people who have those politics.
Please support this game on Kickstarter!
NOTES
While never graphic, this game contains some disturbing themes.
This game is still in development. It contains bugs and missing features.
This game is recommended to be played in one sitting. It will take less than one hour to finish.
Please direct feedback to grantkuning at gmail.com.
CREDITS
Game by Grant Kuning
Art by Ingrid Skare
Music by Blissbox
Roboto Mono by Christian Robertson. Licensed under Apache License 2.0. One character (vertical bar) has been modified.
Download
Install instructions
Windows: Extract the .zip contents to a new folder and run the .exe.
Mac: Extract the app to your desktop. You must run the app from your desktop.
Comments
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Unfortunately this game doesn't seem to be working for me. I'm trying to play on a mac and every time I try to open the game I just get an error message saying the game cannot be found.
The game was very interesting, and I definitely feel like you have a lot of points to make there, and it is designed in ways that are quite innovative, it definitely made me think about narratives, hopefully the kickstarter works out and I can get to see the full version one day!
I actually didn't have a problem with the amount of dialogue, but similarly I had trouble remembering who was who, and the screen panning back and forth when different people were speaking made me sort of dizzy.
It would be great if there could be an option to review the previous text, just in case people clicked too fast and missed something, but couldn't go back to check. And sometimes I clicked on the button to talk just to see what my options are, but I didn't really like any of them, so I wish there could have been an option to back out of talking.
interesting demo, I agree on cutting down on dialogue
This was a fascinating demo. The dialogue felt very natural and the characters all felt like real people to me. My only suggestion is to work on cutting down on some of the dialogue. It was a great read, but I feel like edits might help the pacing. Also, when identifying what jurors I liked and didn't like to the professor, I forgot who was who! Maybe including images for the player to select would be a good idea.
All in all, this was awesome. Great work!