Jack Holmes : Master of Puppets

My first half-hour with Jack Holmes made me nervous for all the wrong reasons: a sluggish apartment opening, oddly proportioned props, and movement so slow you wonder whether the sprint button is broken. That is the bad news, and I want to be upfront about it, because the good news is that the moment you push past that front door and into Frederick's house, something shifts. The game starts to breathe. Scattered notes sketch a story of grief twisted into obsession. Telephone handsets double as save points, lending the place a worn, almost P.T.-adjacent intimacy. The flashlight barely clears a metre ahead, and what lives in that darkness is genuinely strange - living puppets that keep attacking after you shoot their heads off, spider enemies that cluster on walls you can barely see, and animatronics that behave with the specific wrongness that only a solo developer with an unfiltered imagination can produce. The structure moves you through three main environments: a house of macabre experiments, spider-choked mines, and a sprawling amusement park that is the game's real centrepiece. That park is where @TonyDevGame's vision finally gets room to expand. You pass through distinct themed zones - a Bubu's Funhouse area where a killer rabbit freezes whenever you look at it, a Wild West section, a Medieval wing, a neon-lit Cyberglitch stage that affectionately needles Cyberpunk 2077, and a Phantom House thick with exorcist-pose puppets and ghosts. The tonal range is bold for such a small production. Puzzles lean on the classic find-the-code, repair-the-projector rhythm of the genre, and while none of them will stump seasoned survival horror players for long, they are paced well enough to feel purposeful rather than filler. Combat is the roughest part of the experience, and honest accounting demands you know that going in. The handgun's reticle drifts from where shots actually land, enemy health is inconsistent - a puppet might drop in two headshots or absorb several times that - and the sprint speed makes retreating feel like a philosophical exercise. Ammo is genuinely tight, which is refreshing in a genre that often forgets scarcity is the point, but the satisfaction of a clean kill is undercut by how unreliable the shooting feels. There are also clipping bugs that can drop you through geometry and force a reload; telephones are your only saves, so backtracking is real. Voice acting leans hard into wooden mid-nineties B-movie territory, which some players will find charming and others will find immediately grating. The audio more broadly is a mixed picture: the score keeps tension alive, but ambient sound cues for enemy arrivals are inconsistently telegraphed. What holds all of this together is the handcraft underneath the jank. One person built these environments - the gore-streaked basement corridors, the colourful carnival lights, the glass mirror maze, the Squid Game glass-bridge puzzle that you will almost certainly tumble through multiple times. The creature designs carry a Silent Hill quality, warped and specific in ways that feel personal rather than procedural. Steam players have been broadly positive about the experience, sitting at a strong majority of positive reviews, and the consensus tracks with my reading: this is a game that rewards patience with the opening and forgiveness of the rough edges. The free prologue - playable as young Eddie navigating the amusement park before everything goes wrong - is genuinely the best onboarding decision the developer made, and I would start there before committing.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

Be the first to comment on Jack Holmes : Master of Puppets.