The game is a point'n'click adventure similar to LucasArts' old adventure games, and more recently to Ankh series. Jack is a ship captain traveling in the Colonial England with other two comrades. Under special circumstances he is obliged to take a job from British Secret Service. A job which will cause him trouble along the way, and which will force him to get involved in much more complicated situations when he reaches Tooth Island. Doctor T. is the evil character of the game and the ruler of the island. He is a strange scientist who cultivates man-eating plants and has a devilish plan against the British Empire. There is also Amanda, a beautiful girl from America who is eager to make herself worth in Doctor T.s service. Let's not forget the "best secret agent" of the British Empire, called Montgomerey, who should be escorted to Tooth Island by Jack, and who in the end, becomes a useless person. Apparently he becomes the meal for a jungle monster.

Tooth Island is a hidden place, and inhabited by strange characters. You will first meet the colonials represented by the owner of the "one star hotel" (who is obsessed by his single star), the two guardians (who will never end in arguing themselves), the elephant taxi driver (with an Indian Punjabi accent), and Doctor T.'s secretary (an extremely sour old lady). These characters have a powerful impact on the whole atmosphere, as they are represented by good voice acting (although the original was in German) with exaggerated but funny accents for each one of them. The only problem is that the original text scenario was created in German, and the English version is the product of a brief translation, so many of the jokes make almost no sense in English or sometimes there are not as funny as in the original language. Not to mention the spoken dialogs, which in many scenes don't match with the subtitles. As I was testing the German version to feel exactly what the developers wanted to express in some of the dialogs, I figured out that the humoristic style was still far from the original adventure games (such as Lucas Arts classics). There is not even one adult joke, the dialogs resuming to a more Disney humor style. Though in some way you can feel that the developers wanted to get something else, but in the end they have limited themselves to a more commercial scenario targeting the young audience.

The game is based on a classical puzzle system which includes use of inventory items, combinations of items, and has two types of structures. It begins with easy puzzles related to real life, in which you have to use a key in a keyhole in order to open a door. I consider this to be the first structure, a very easy one which helps the gamer to enter in the core of the game. The second structure would be based on a more non-logical way of thinking. You have to figure it out that a man-eating plant wrapped in a tropical creeper, combined with a peanut-shell, must be placed on a porch in order to get rid of a monkey which pedals an electricity generator.

This really sounds weird and is nonsense but you will find more of these puzzles further in the game. Actually the game is not as hard as it seems at the first look. The learning curve is not very steep and you will fast get acquainted with the puzzles system.

In order to make the gameplay more fun and varied, you will have the opportunity to play with a second character: Amanda. In the beginning she will be in Doctor T's service but later on she decides to switch sides in Jack's favor. She represents a second alternative of the story but unfortunately not very well exploited. Several perspective changes between both characters would have been much more interesting, and it would have offered a wider variety of puzzles.

Jack Keane should be taken as a Sunday afternoon game, when you want to relax but you are bored of the same Hollywood movies. With its aquarelle graphics, with its childish humor and sometimes smart puzzles, Jack Keane can be considered a family video game. Only with one condition: if you can overlook the numerous bugs and issues. First of all the game doesn't run extremely smooth and the loading times are quite long. The audio quality is quite low because of a bad mixing process (or the lack of it). And at some point an object picked in the inventory can become invisible.