i love me a sylvie and hubol game!
very light spoiler warning, in case you want to go into the game completely blind. if you know you like sylvie's/hubol's games, or if a strange exploration platformer sounds up your alley, then i'd honestly recommend playing that way. it's free in your browser at https://sylvie.website/JIGGLYZONE/, so why not give it a whirl?

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the game is an exploration, metroidvania platformer. though the majority of the game's world is comprised of only blocks and spikes, with stationary npcs and treasure sprinkled in, sylvie and hubol do a wonderful job making each place feel varied and unique. the level design has a messy, cluttered feel to it, though is never careless; the levels are very deliberate in their overall design. the messiness meshes well with the impressionistic approach the level design uses to depict its environments; the city is represented with simple pillars of blocks, the underwater area conveyed through enclosed levels. each of these varied level design styles creates a unique navigational feel, with players naturally moving differently depending on where they are.
you always have to be thinking about your movement, because the game gets difficult. there's just so many spikes everywhere! you have see and then weave your way through these deathily cluttered places. once you're able to see through the spikes, the levels are rather open. this makes the few places that seem blocked off stand out more. see, the game does have key items required for progression, that grant you new abilities. these abilities are rather simplistic, mechanically, but once you unlock one, you understand the game's level design in a new way; things open up in a way that feel pretty distinct from your standard metroidvania.
there are also plenty of items that do absolutely nothing for you, besides being silly; this game has some fun item descriptions.

the game's presentation is on point.
the messy feel is exemplified through the game's visual style. there are a number of tile graphics for both spikes and blocks, all being rather simple designs, but they're applied seemingly at random. so, parsing the game's levels becomes a challenge requiring the player stay engaged. the backgrounds further add to this, often having a nice scrap-book-y look to them.
hubol and sylvie's color choices are solid throughout, giving each locale a lot of character.
a good soundtrack does a lot for me, and hubol's soundtrack sure as heck is good. while the songs are short, they go a long way towards giving the game its character, with a fun, offbeat, peculiarly catchy sound.

i've mostly neglected, so far in this review, to talk about the characters spread throughout the game world. they're always stationary, the guards never moving from their post, the hooligans never sneaking around, as their dialogue is the point. they're usually amusing, with strange rhymes and random capitalization, but also helps you understand the complexities of this admittedly simple world. you pick up hints of these different cultures, of tragedies that have transpired; you see characters from one place in another, implying they've travelled. i dunno, it's arguably simple, but i feel like they're done really well here.

the game certainly had its flaws, but i didn't care about them. they never subtracted from my experience (though i see how they could for someone else). i quite liked this game. again, it's free and can be played in your browser (https://sylvie.website/JIGGLYZONE/), so if you haven't played it, and it sounds fun, why not try it?
or why not check out the soundtrack on bandcamp? https://hubol.bandcamp.com/album/jiggly-zone-ost

Played during the Backloggd’s Game of the Week (23rd May – 29th May, 2023).

Jiggly Zone is bizarre, garish, and even a bit nonsensical, it's a labyrinthine gauntlet of precision platforming challenges with only the faintest hints of attempting to frame any of it, and that's basically all the game is. Jiggly Zone is also an extremely cleverly designed game that I thoroughly enjoyed a large portion of. The big thing that separates this game from a lot of other precision platformers that I've experienced is in the way its precision comes less from stringing together sets of insanely strict inputs, and more from pushing even the most basic of movement systems to its limit before expanding upon it even further. Even before the player is given the ability to jump multiple times, there's still this incredibly prominent feeling of Sylvie having been deeply familiar with every facet of what the player is capable of, with the various jump heights all being tested, along with messing about with level boundaries and having to progress through some rooms in a vaguely unconventional way just to get past something that could've seemed very simple at first.

It's rarely anything all too difficult, but it's the way it meshes with the exploration and required backtracking that makes all of it shine so much to me. This is particularly impressive with the way that each room is entirely recontextualised upon gaining new capabilities, not only letting the player reach new areas they weren't before, but also shaping the possibilities of how to traverse previous areas as well, usually leading to far easier methods of moving around to the point where rooms that felt like obstacles now are 2nd nature. The checkpoint system also ties really nicely into this in a couple of different ways as well. While providing the player a method of basically making a checkpoint wherever they are as long as they're standing on flat ground seems like a surefire way to make things extremely easy for the player, there's a bit of a risk-reward dynamic associated with it that I really enjoyed thinking about.

While it's true that you could theoretically throw your checkpoint down after every obstacle, the frequent branching paths that lead to a dead end with just a treasure at the end mean that you could actually create more work for yourself. The little questions of whether it was worth putting down the checkpoint after a particularly hard jump frequently popped up, since just making it that bit further and collecting the treasure you were aiming for meant that you'd just be able to death abuse after grabbing it, bypassing needing to go back through that same tough obstacle again. It essentially led to a far more situational and dynamic system than it might've first appeared to have been, and reveals yet another way in which these was a far more clever game than what it first seemed.

The main thing that really stops me from outright loving this however, is the fact that the 2nd and 3rd powerup were put way too close together and felt as if they entirely trivialised a lot of sections that felt as if they were almost intended to have been explored before collecting that 3rd powerup. This turned the last stretch of the game outside of the absolutely brutal final area into a pretty uneventful slog, where you were just able to effortlessly breeze through everything while still feeling as if you had a bit to go. It wasn't quite a case of things feeling second nature and more intuitive either, it was more akin to feeling as if the player was a bit too strong for the challenges that had been crafted, unceremoniously bypassing everything instead, including a bunch of areas that you hadn't explored before. Despite this, I thought it was pretty cool, the style this game has of being so aggressively singular in its focus (in this case, level design above all else) is the kind of thing I could see myself really getting into making as well, so I do find it quite interesting from that perspective as well, since if anything, this is proof that even that could be really effective.

Played during the Backloggd’s Game of the Week (23rd May – 29th May, 2023).

sylvie's many games are fascinating meditations on game design, relying on the poetic contrast between a sweet atmosphere and devious level design, while Hubol's titles are more absurd, whimsical and garish, as in Craz'd! (2009). Their productions must be understood through an aesthetic of subversion, playing with traditional codes and the player's expectations. For example, cat planet (2009), a more concise project by sylvie, subverted the idea of a single action button, but remained relatively superficial in its exploration of game design. JIGGLY ZONE revisits this initial idea, but takes the opposite approach. The player controls a Jigglypuff and must collect fragments of medallions scattered across seven different worlds. Initially, Jiggly can only make a single jump, but the title gradually tries to push the player to their limits by offering a series of technical obstacles. The placement of platforms and spikes requires careful movement, making full use of the jump palette. The first objective, implied by the various Jigglies that populate this strange world, is to obtain a power-up in the Golden City. This allows the player to make successive jumps of decreasing height.

JIGGLY ZONE immediately takes advantage of this new resource by introducing more challenging aerial platforming, with multiple spikes dotting the screen. Despite the roughness of some sections, sylvie's philosophy is not to alienate the player: by pressing the down button, a checkpoint can be placed on Jiggly's position. This acts as a de facto savestate, breaking up the progression into easily digestible micro-sections. Much like Celeste (2018), the title allows players to familiarise themselves with Jiggly's powers at their own pace, but rewards their proactive – albeit often optional – use, as well as exiting the boundaries of the levels. In the first few minutes, each screen may seem chaotic and labyrinthine, but the acquisition of power-ups recontextualises them, as the player is able to get through a previously major ordeal in no time. JIGGLY ZONE manages to alter the pace and mode of exploration to avoid becoming unpleasantly monotonous. The lack of a map, which players will have to draw themselves in order to find their way through the world, is perhaps unfortunate. It is frustrating to get lost in a series of visually similar screens near the end, trying to find chests that were inaccessible at the start of the game.

There's something fascinating about the way the world of JIGGLY ZONE is constructed. The pixel art assets contrast nicely with the crepe paper backgrounds. The NPCs' dialogue is disjointed, and the player is treated like a pariah. Nowhere are they welcome, and all the characters are either sarcastic, contemptuous or defiant. Each group protects its treasures, but Jiggly simply ignores their warnings and complaints. The Golden City has suffered an apocalypse, the nature of which eludes the player. All that remains are the ruins of gilded buildings, their blocks engraved with a dollar sign. Was it the avarice of the inhabitants or that of the looters that brought the city to its knees? No answer is given, except that Jiggly grabs the last remaining treasure.

The various NPCs seem to be mere reflections of themselves, their remarks devoid of any rationality. As the title progresses, this feeling deepens, their words distorted and their sentences pierced by an eerie silence, like the hull of a ship cracked by the sea. This is of little interest to Jiggly. Conversation with the locals was a welcome reward when progression was slow and cautious. But with increasing power, the presence of other life forms becomes obsolete, anecdotal. In the final minutes, the player collects the last medallion shards without remorse. And then there is only silence.