Onesimus: A Quest for Freedom

The Good
I have known about Jill of the Jungle, including the two non-shareware episodes, for quite a while. When I found out Onesimus, a graphical modification of the Jill games existed, I played it and was pleased to see that the essence of Jill was still there...the great gameplay, the music, and the humor streak that pervades throughout the trilogy. It's quite possibly the greatest Christian game ever made, but truthfully, there's not a lot of competition in the genre.

The Bad
It's a terrible shame that the Christian game market is composed of either boring platform games or graphical modifications of other popular games. So in the tradition of Sunday Funday and Super Noah's Ark 3D, Ark took a grab bag of levels from the three Jill games and threw them together with the occasional graphical modification. The giant green lizard men have been replaced with guards. The flying devils have been replaced by some dude who's able to walk around in the air. The arrow for added jumping power and the throwing star have been replaced by a spring and a rock. How is a spring somehow less primitive than an arrow? That's a mistake right there. They removed the ability for the character to be able to change into animals, so there goes a small but appealing piece of Jill's charm. They changed exactly none of the music or sound effects, so instead of hearing Christian hymns as you play the game, you get the same catchy, synthesizer-infused tunes that the original Jill games used. What's worse is that, since the sound effects have remained unchanged, whenever Onesimus loses a life he squeals in a very high pitched voice. That doesn't add much to the realism of the game, if they were trying to stay true to the fact that Onesimus is male, presumably with a much deeper voice than the sound effects would have you believe. All in all, I was just pissed at how incredibly lazy the designers were in making this game appropriate for the "Christian" gamer. There's so much more they could have done to improve the atmosphere of Onesimus, but unfortunately, they only went halfway with this.

The Bottom Line
Me being a big Jill fan, I was excited when I first found out this game existed because I thought it would be like a "Jill of the Jungle 4", a Jill game with all new levels, but at the small expense of having a different sprite used for the main character. I was unfortunately wrong- almost all 30 of the levels here are copied from the three Jill games. The only original levels I noticed are the very first and very last levels. In short, you don't really want to waste your time with this unless you're a truly devoted Jill fan. If you've completed the trilogy, trust me, you've seen it all before. Unless you really want to laugh at Onesimus screaming like Jill when he drowns or gets impaled or something.