Community Visual Novel Book Club - Jack-In-A-Castle

[Exzyleph]

Welcome to the 15th MetaCouncil visual novel book club!

For this book club we will be reading Nemlei's Jack-In-A-Castle, a visual novel about a young man's search for a lost king in a warped castle in a kingdom of toys. Bookclub participants can obtain Jack-In-A-Castle on Steam and on Itch. There is also a free demo on both sites. Jack-In-A-Castle is a short visual novel of approximately 51k words long and complete playthrough is estimated to take 3 to 6 hours.​

This is an informal book club, so there is no fixed schedule; you simply read a visual novel at your own pace, and share your thoughts along the way or when you are done reading. Just remember to use spoiler tags liberally. For general information about past and future book clubs, please see the main MetaCouncil Book Club thread.​

The Story

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"Toyboxian's king has gone missing, and the kingdom’s castle has become warped. Marion the Marionette is sent by his village elder to investigate. He becomes a servant at the warped castle, working under the stand-in ruler Jack.

Jack is a jack-in-the-box with a personality as unexpected and delightful as a landmine.

Along the way Marion will also meet Bunnie, a bubbly bunny plushie. As well as his unlikely friend, Sylvester, a refined and aristocratic music box. Together they have set out with the common goal of finding the whereabouts of the king.

Explore the story from different points of view, and discover how many ways you can screw things up!"

[Taken from Steam]​

Walkthroughs

A guide to obtaining all endings can be found here.​

Next Month

The last last visual novel bookclub title of 2020 is Raging Loop (VNDB), a time-loop mystery visual novel about a group of people caught in a remote village where ancient gods hunt them down one-by-one.​

 

[Exzyleph]

So I finished reading Jack-In-A-Castle a while back, but for various reasons I didn't get around to writing about it.

It was decently enjoyable read with a charming cast of characters (yes, even Jack), though the relationships felt too shallow for my tastes, a frequent problem with VNs this short. I also wished that we got to see more of a certain beat-boxing character, but sadly they only played a role in a couple of routes.

Spoiler

There's not a terrible lot to discuss in terms of spoilers. The endings were fairly straight forward, with my favorite ending being the one where Marion just fucks off back home and chills with his master. That was honestly the one that felt most in character for Marion. However, I also quite enjoyed Bunny and Jack's romantic endings.

I would also have liked the king to play a more active role, and perhaps even have had a proper route, though it is understandable that he was incapacitated for most of the story for plot reasons. I would have liked to learn more of his fall into despair and (potentially) his recovery. As it stands, it reads a bit too much as a poor metaphor for depression, with some unfortunate ways of "solving" that problem in some of the routes.

The next book club will be for Raging Loop, though unfortunately that title is not discounted in the current Steam sale. The thread will go up early next month as per usual.