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.