The Adventures of Joost Vekkes Klaarkens:
A summary for those with less context
The Adventures of Joost Vekkes Klaarkens (AJVK for short) is an adventure/RPG/kinda video game being created by a team of unqualified college students from the USA. It is an incredibly ambitious project with a low chance of completion, but that isn’t stopping us from trying to actually go and make it.
The game mainly focuses around an elaborate tongue-in-cheek conspiracy theory that we’ve come up with, which includes such things as Native American fusion reactors, zipper-stealing aliens, and, perhaps most importantly to the game, secret control of most of the world by the Netherlands. The game takes place throughout history, but with very little regard for the actual order in which time passes. Instead, it will be whatever date is convenient for the current scene, regardless of what time it is before or after. One of our design philosophies behind the events in the game is that we put in what we find amusing, and have no obligation to explain ourselves.
The plot of the game is quite elaborate. It involves you, the player, traveling the world and interacting with the characters you encounter. A large number if these interactions are battles of some form. The game has four acts: 1, 4, 63, and 2.000. Act 1 is the introduction and the game’s main battles. Act 4 includes additional battles and travel, with more storyline and sidequests. During Act 63 you fight in the Great Emu Wars on the side of the emus. Finally, Act 2.000 is the conclusion, featuring a grand reunion with the game’s best characters, and of course the final boss fight against King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands.
Plot Summary
with technical details omitted for the sake of brevity
The game begins with a narrator explaining that it’s 1621 and you are a member of a rebel group trying to stop the Dutch from gaining control of the entire world. You have been sent to the Indian Ocean to investigate Dutch East India Co ships. However, when you get there, you find that all the ships have sunk. So you swim to the bottom of the ocean (casually) and find a large pipe, which you swim into. On the other side is an underwater meadow where namesake of the game Joost Vekkes Klaarkens awaits. He is a deer with a fencing foil and hats on his antlers, and he challenges you to a duel. You must defeat him, and upon doing so, he vanishes Obi-wan Kenobi style, and his spirit is transferred into his fencing foil. Picking it up, you will use this as your own weapon for the rest of the game. As you grab the sword, Joost’s voice speaks to you from within it, instructing you to find and duel his granddeermother. After this you are subjected to a 2 hour cutscene in the form of Tarzan the Reboot the Movie, an entirely separate project of ours that somehow found its way into this game. After that you are launched in Joost's treasure chest via a massive railgun to the Congo, where you must battle Tarzan. After that, you walk through the jungles to the coast, build a raft, sail to Saint Helena, and fistfight Napoleon. His British captors, impressed, give you a ship which you use to sail all the way to Florida. By this point it is present day, and you battle Florida Man in multiple incarnations. After escaping the havoc that ensues, you travel north, eventually making it to Connecticut, where you unwillingly battle an engineering student at Yale called Double Carl, who doesn’t want to fight you either. After deliberately breaking the game mid-battle so you can stop fighting, you take him out to dinner to make ammends in a live-action cutscene. On your way back from dinner, you fall down a manhole and, upon emerging, find yourself outside some town in Connecticut, where you find Joost’s granddeermother in a clearing in the woods. She duels you with knitting needles, which prove to be quite effective. In fact, if you disarm her, she has an incredible ability to find more in nearby haystacks. After this continues for some time, the duel concludes in a civilized fashion, and with this, Act 1: The Dutch comes to a close.
Act 4: The Dutch begins next, as you continue North, finding a creepy abandoned camper in the woods (which may foreshadow a quest later in the game), and later battling an entity known as the Champion of Maine. This entity is a stack of other characters, including Theodore Roosevelt riding a moose. After this battle, you take a bullet train to North Dakota, where you find a paraceratherium, the largest land animal to ever have existed, and promptly tame it as a mount to ride across the Canadian arctic. You ride to Greenland, and on reaching the coast, you hitchhike with vikings to Norway, where you may or may not see some casual Norse gods. From there you make your way to Russia, by way of Sweden. You pass through the town of Älmhult, making a surprising discovery in the town’s Ikea. You learn that there is a massive portal network linking all the world’s Ikeas, which they use to restock the stores. In fact, you take advantage of this, and use the portal to expedite your journey to Russia, emerging from an Ikea in Moscow. You attend a bear wresteing event in the city, where a special agent from the country’s alien leadership offers you the choice to embark on mission to steal zippers from the YKK factory in Japan. If you decline, you simply make your way to India by way of the Middle East. If you accept, you and your giant rhinoceros are transported by UFO to the factory, where you release the paraceratherium as a distraction while you raid the place for zippers. At the end, you are flown back to somewhere in Siberia, from where you make your way to India. There, you find a particular office building that, when you walk through it, you are transported back to Pangaea. This allows you to walk to the land that will become Australia, where you find another identical building, which takes you to Australia in 1932. This marks the end of Act 4.
Now begins Act 63: The Dutch, in which you take part in the Great Emu War on the side of the emus. The emus have advanced technology and military strategies, easily overpowering the Australian humans with their emu zeppelins and weaponized rabbits. The war ends with the emus gaining governmental control of Australia. After the war, the emus give you a lift to Hawaii in one of their zeppelins. (that’s about as much as we’ve determined at this point)
The final act, Act 2.000 (sig figs): The Dutch, takes you from Hawaii to the west coast of North America, by way of a submarine piloted by sea otters. You then travel on an as-yet-undetermined journey across the US, possibly by way of Mexico. On your way, you stop at an old-style hotel somewhere in the southern USA. You befriend the hotel clerk, who in fact turns out to be 38 ferrets in a human suit. However, you can be trusted with his secret, and learning this, he decides to accompany you on the rest of your journey. You eventually wind up on the campus of Union College in New York, the central building of which houses a secret fusion reactor which was built by the Native Americans but is now run by the Dutch. Here, you gather a team of familiar characters to prepare for the final boss fight with King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands, who awaits in the room above the fusion reactor. However, after much buildup and a dramatic cutscene full of intense music, the final battle begins only for game to immediately “crash”, whereat Joost’s voice from the sword congratulates you sarcastically for breaking the game. If you restart, you rejoin to see the smoke clearing, and your pellow party member commenting on what an amazing final boss battle they just fought.