Jolly Good: Cakes and Ale is a legitimate masterpiece. After completing my initial run and reading the Author’s Note, I decided to play through the game with five separate stat focuses to see how the story would change. Even after finding out the story was written with that kind of adaptability in mind, the variance in tone was flat out amazing.
Culture/Persuade with the Ambassador’s Party scandal was downright tragic. I started off as a devil-may-care version of Gustave from the Grand Budapest Hotel, living with no regard for the consequences of my actions because of how charmed my life seemed to be. I dressed to the nines, encouraged Vyv to forget about his studies, and promised everything to everyone in the Opera, Newspaper, and Arena chapter. Then my old college friends tried to get me drunk, drawing my character into the exact scandal that ruined his reputation, and he went along with it wholeheartedly.
It was goddamned horrible.
I had to restart the chapter and turn them down. It was the first time I’d considered the consequences of anything the entire game, and it felt like whatever magic held my protagonist’s life together began to wane as he excused himself from their table. With the exception of helping Fitzie join the Rose and Thorn, everything I tried that night was a disaster. The printing press exploded, the Noble Gasses lost the bout, and the Opera was a total catastrophe. I wasn’t even elected club president. And despite all that, right before the end of the story, Vyv said he was modeling his behavior after me. Good lord I felt terrible.
Bold/Persuade with the Political Speech scandal was almost the opposite. I was brash, emotional, and a complete disaster in the eyes of good society, but utterly loyal to anyone I considered a friend. I fell backwards through four panes of glass to protect a punchbowl owned by a total stranger, won a public shouting match with an orphan, took several punches from a professional boxer helping my valet play matchmaker, and charged into an angry mob - of my own creation - to defend the honor of a woman I’d met less than a month ago. The whole mess was so brilliantly ridiculous it almost reminded me of Toast of London, but in the end it all worked out perfectly. The Noble Gasses won the tournament by a hair, Fitzie got her photograph, the two of us fell in love, and I was elected club president by a landslide. The resulting fire did spell the end of Ernie’s punchbowl, but by that point in the story I was laughing too hard to care. Poor Pilcrow had just been put in charge of teaching spycraft to a blackbird, and she was the only one trying to put out the fire! What an absolutely perfect ending.
My three other playthroughs made liberal use of cheats, and this review is already long enough, so I won’t talk about them in detail. Suffice to say that with the appropriate combination of stat editing and story choices, it is completely possible to play Jolly Good as a tribute to The Fantastic Mr. Fox, an optimistic retelling of Don Quixote, or a Wodehouse reimagining of Going Postal. This game is absolutely fantastic, and I can’t wait for the next installment in the series.
My heart bleeds for Rory 
And Haze.
. Since that is what I considered as one of my canon endings. Along with