Jim Brimstone: Devil Advocate by AploveStudio

Jim Brimstone: Devil Advocate is a short visual novel where you play as the world's worst lawyer. Lie, deny, and manipulate your client's way to freedom!
| Itch | https://aplovestudio.itch.io/brimstone |
| Newgrounds | https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/926207 |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/jim-brimstone-devil-advocate |
Ratings
| Overall | 292th | 3.833⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 507th | 3.524⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 1013th | 2.875⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 646th | 3.595⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 64th | 4.524⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 461th | 3.429⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 65th | 4.143⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 88th | 4.167⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 22🗳️ | 7🗨️ |
The writing was great, and the level of difficulty was right in the sweet spot - most of the questions were simple to answer if you were paying attention, but a few I had to think about.
An area of improvement I would give is that this was a text-heavy game, but the text boxes were being populated/updated in real time as each letter arrived. This causes a jarring visual effect when the words wrap to the next line. I found myself double-tapping the space bar to make the text show up all at once to avoid that, which caused me to miss the judge's question a handful of times. (Being able to see the question he asked at the bottom of the screen when you were picking your answer may have helped).
Your entry is one of a very few I've seen so far to use a really minimal color palette to a great effect. The artwork was minimalist, but still detailed in the faces, which is where my attention was mostly drawn to.
Oh, and I can't end my review without mentioning the amazing double-entendre of demon summon/jury summons. Remarkable work!
I found the text hard to read as it was appearing on screen.
Anyway good result, mate!
Great art and sounds, though the tapping of the keyboard started to get slightly annoying after a while. Very nice bit of writing, I liked the references and the dialogues overall.
I had two minor issues (nitpicks) with it - first, sometimes the successful responses were just a tiny bit too "cliché" (spoiler):
!> Like Tripping and falling onto a knife.
Second, even when paying attention to the dialogue, some of the responses were too much of a guesswork (spoiler):
!> I had no way of knowing (I think) that the correct bullet was #2.
I have no doubt that both could be solved with a bit more time to come up with something else.
Also, apart from Jim Brimstone being a devil, I don't see much connection to the theme.
All in all, those are all really minor things. I actually spent a lot more time playing than I thought I would, it was really fun. Great job!
Artwork was awesome, I really dig the subtle palette as well as the other lawyer looking progressively more disheveled after dealing with your nonsense.
My only real complaint is the text boxes changing size with the text as it came onto the screen for the dialogue. I'm not sure what engine you used, but I'm sure there's probably a way to have a fixed size text box and just have the text appear inside of that, possibly with the use of substrings, for instance. Other than that, though, I thought it was a solid entry and it had me chuckle a few times. Great job!