posted: 2024-11-14
Celeste isn’t the best platformer from 2018, it’s actually…
JIGGLY ZONE, a platformer by sylvie & hubol, featuring JIGGLER.
No, seriously.
What, you think Celeste is cool with its precision platforming and its narrative and its allegory for the trans experience? Well eat shit dork JIGGLY ZONE is that and MORE. Celeste has spike rooms? Buddy, there are more spike rooms than non-Spike Rooms in JIGGLY ZONE. And yeah, you will die, a LOT. Celeste teaches me how to manage my anxiety? Well hold your horses there because JIGGLY ZONE is a story about reshaping the universe in your image through the power of kindness and community (no I won’t elaborate on this one).
Oh, yeah, sure, everyone knows Trans people can double jump.
Jiggler has FIVE jumps.
Admittedly, I have not played many of hubol’s games but after playing JIGGLY ZONE, I’m certainly inclined to try them. Lord knows I probably should have already. So instead, let me share a little bit about sylvie.
I love sylvie’s approach to game design. Her games focus around some cute little mascot-shaped character speaking in an absurd, abstract way that somehow conveys the exactly perfect feeling. Her game, cat planet, a game where you control a little angel girl “on the planet of the cats and [you’ve] gots to find the cats and explore the cats to find the planet!!” 1 , is a true favorite of mine. You can explore the surface of the planet, the jungle, the lava caves, the factory, and then the evil last area which puts the “spike” in “difficulty spike”. Many of sylvie’s games are like this, they’re cute, they’re charming, and they can get a little weird 2. Another stupendously memorable sylvie game is sylvie tower, though that one I’ll let you try for yourself once you’ve spent your time with JIGGLY ZONE. Sylvie is one of the coolest people on the internet, in my personal opinion. I figure the first YouTuber to realize this fact and do a deep dive of her work will probably go lowercasejai Charlie Sheen video-level viral.
In JIGGLY ZONE, you play as JIGGLER, a Jigglypuff (?) enlisted to reconstruct seven medallions each broken into six pieces. Over the course of the game you collect various treasures in addition to the medallion pieces, and speak with the local JIGGLERs along the way. Well, maybe more, you listen to them. For the uninitiated, these JIGGLERs speak like the middleman between Mr. Saturn Earthbound and Temmie Undertale 3. And the tunes backing these lovely conversations feel right at home with “HI! HI! HI!” and “Temmie Village”. All props to hubol for making the soundtrack, there’s nothing quite like talking to a JIGGLER trying to sell me guns while the dinkiest little midi song with its bleeps and bloops and its distroted little “JIGGLY” accenting the end of every other measure, plays. Another anecdote because I can, while listening to “City in Gold”, I straight up laughed out when the strummed strings play in my headphone's left speaker SIGNIFICANTLY LOUDER THAN THE REST OF THE MIX. Listen, is the music going to get on your nerves? I mean, yes. Of course. “Duh”, even.
This game feels like a strange doujin game. No, not the porn kind, the “I Wanna Be the Guy” kind. It’s a game that feels like it was born in 2006. JIGGLER eventually gets a power up that lets them jump five (5) times, which is almost certainly lifted from Jigglypuff's movements in Super Smash Bros. Melee. The music, as previously noticed sounds like something a novice, yet excited, Mother fan might make. The backgrounds are something out of an old pre-loaded 3D video studio background. The tiles might as well have been lifted from some kind of stock package. This stuff’s ugly, dude. But that’s what makes it so fascinating. For all intents and purposes, you could mistake this for babby’s first shitpost game.
Of course, that’s not what JIGGLY ZONE really is.
JIGGLY ZONE is a precision platforming game, a “Masocore” game, if you will. These are games are “sub-genre specifically designed to frustrate players by combining complex game mechanics with intense, seemingly impossible difficulty.” 4 Usually these games have infinite lives to compensate the player, probably the only affordance they give, actually. Returning to the “doujin” nature of the visuals and gameplay, Masocore games share a lot of common design philosophies found in doujin bullet hell games, like the Touhou Project. Hell, “I Wanna Be The Guy”, the most popular Masocore game is it self a doujin game the way it parodies classic NES “Nintendo Hard” titles.
They call this shit "Nintendo Hard"
In that sense, Masocore games lean on the board of what some may call “abusive” game design. As defined by Douglas Wilson and Miguel Sicart in their conference publication: “Now It’s Personal: On Abusive Game Design”, abusive game design is design that “focuses on creating a dialogue between the designer and the player”, through mental anguish by means of unfair level design, bodily assault through gameplay and aesthetic design, and social embarrassment through the conceptual design of the game itself. This is a whole conversation in and of itself, but just keep in mind that many, if not all, Masocore games exhibit some kind of abusive game design.
Masocore games grew in popularity on the internet due to their amusingly unfair difficulty, almost through a sense of voyeurism. In a previous age you could get popular on YouTube by naming your playthrough video of a Kaizo Mario Bros. romhack while swearing up a storm “Super Mario Frustration”. A video titled “Super Kaizo World - Special Stage 2 Part 1” gets 1.9 MILLION views, and the only highlight is ProtonJon screaming “MOVE FASTER POKEY!”. People loved to watch other people play stupid hard video games.
And they still do today, though the abusive “asshole game design” itself has gone through its fair share of morphs and refitting for various genres. These evolutions have today taken on the previously referenced prefix “Kaizo”. The romhack, Pokemon Emerald Kaizo comes to mind as a perfect example of the “asshole” game design being perfectly remixed into something new: instead of a carpal-tunnel inducing platformer, it’s a “one miscalculation and your party is wiped” kind of turn-based role playing game. So when an “expert” gamer emerges and triumphs over the abusive game design, we celebrate them with video views, social standing and even financial compensation. Somehow, the commodification of the “abuse survivor” accolade has even reached gamers 5. Funny how that works.
Regardless, modern Masocore games are fundamentally linked to romhacks making them slightly more under the radar in today’s gaming landscape. Your average “bro gamer” ain’t playing any kind of Masocore game any time soon, though maybe they’ll claim Dark Souls or Elden ring as one, I don’t know them (they’re wrong though). They probably won’t even know a term for these kinds of games exists, let alone the games themselves. Unless they’re playing Super Mario Maker, Nintendo’s response to any kind of Lunar Magic. Look buddy, I KNOW you’ve seen at least one Game Grumps “Super Mario Maker Rage” compilation at least once in your terminally online life 6.
So you’ve gotten accustomed to Super Mario Maker “Kaizo” levels, yeah, no problem. Now you see this cool new 2018 platformer, Celeste! It’s piss-hard! But it also has some extremely forgiving checkpoints, which isn’t something any of those Kaizo Mario Maker levels offered. Celeste is as forgiving as it is difficult. That is, Celeste teaches you how to handle frustrating failure with regular assurance and kindness. Things might be hard, but life is hard, and you can do it.
That's a lotta spikes!!!
Despite the implication from a cursory glance, Celeste exhibits little-to-not abusive design. The room-to-room level design is excessively challenging, but never obviously unfair. Rooms are littered with spikes, but in such a way that feels very natural in the mountainous setting and in such a way that never implies an impossible task. Larger rooms that extend beyond the visible space are presented with a set of binoculars, allowing you to scout out every single obstacle in your path. the closes thing to physical abuse might stem from a cramp you might get in your hands after gripping your controller too tight when making precise little movements. The aesthetics are pleasant, if not outright designed to evoke a sense of pride in achievement and comfort in accomplishment after overcoming a particularly difficult task. Even the characters in Celeste talk about their insecurities, and what it means to surpass their fears and to reach the summit of self-actualization and compassion. This isn’t a true Masocore game; there’s not a trace of abusive level-design to be found in Celeste. There is a careful, yet elegant, blend of the difficult level design and the design of the space, which leaves Celeste feeling like a polished and caring game through and through.
And then there’s JIGGLY ZONE.
Let me first begin with the level design: there are more rooms with seemingly random distributions of spikes than not in JIGGLY ZONE. From an outside view, the various platforms and spiky obstacles littered about each room appear to be placed as if a young child scribbled across their KidPix canvas with the sticker brush tool. They’re wrong. Each one is placed so intentionally to create a microcosmic challenge with every single movement. It’s a good thing you can create an instant checkpoint as long as you’re not moving by pressing the DOWN arrow key. Each treasure chest with a medallion piece is situated in a spot just so chosen to suggest a tight, but makeable jump.
Creative gamers may notice that there aren’t any “out-of bounds” death planes except at the very bottom of the screen, and that it’s entirely possible to go above the level geometry. You can fall down the sides of each room; not even the user interface can prevent you falling to your demise. Thus, players looking to “cheese” their way through rooms can make use of this level design quirk. The game never scolds these players “hey don’t do that”, it simply sits there with a vacant JIGGLER smile while hubol’s seemingly intentionally shitty level midis play.
It’s almost like… the game… expects you to do this…
Eventually you’ll find upgrades that naturally alter the way you approach puzzles. The first upgrade you’ll receive is “the ability to jump higher”, i.e. JIGGLER gets five jumps. These jumps function identically to Jigglypuff’s movement in Super Smash Bros. Melee. Each successive jump affords JIGGLER less and less height, while still providing uniform lateral movement. The last few jumps in the jumping sequence hardly allow for any kind of vertical scaling that they may seem trivial to use outside of a momentum correcting action. But I promise you, they’re not. About 3/4 of the way through the game, you get the gravity flip powerup, which does exactly what it says on the can. through experimentation, however, observant cheesers might discover that JIGGLER only dies when they reach the bottom-most part of the map depending on the gravity- the death plane is relative. Is this a simple, unexpected programming quirk? No. The final upgrade is the Ghost powerup, which turns JIGGLER into a werewolf- no, it’s actually a ghost I was just joshing you. As everyone knows, ghosts can pass through walls, and GHOST JIGGLER is no exception. However, by becoming corporeal within a wall, JIGGLER will stop all movement, and hey wouldn’t you know, you can make a checkpoint inside of a wall. Surely that HAS to be a useless oversight, right? …Right? Each power up is just compelling enough to encourage a jaded, perhaps worn out player, to keep on exploring, to find every little secret.
Unfortunately, if the player keeps moving forward, they’ll eventually reach the Crimson Isles. It brings me no joy, dear reader, that if you reach the Crimson Isles in your playthrough of JIGGLY ZONE, it is too late for you. The Crimson Isles are rooms subdivided into precision platforming puzzles with spikes dominating any and all visual spaces. The color palette is offensive to the eyes, and the midi is similarly rude. Imagine the worst worst electronic percussive hits coupled with a shitty rolling organ playing some dinky unmelodic sequence only for a grungy, dissonant electric guitar midi to enter the song almost a minute in and blare the grimiest noise you’ve ever heard. That’s the Crimson Isles experience. What was once a lackadaisical daydream has turned into a hyper-precise nightmare.
BOOW
Those supposedly trivial extra jumps are no longer trivial, they now dictate whether JIGGLER lives or “BOOM”s. In fact, in order to progress through “The Mouth”, you have to understand JIGGLER’s fourth and fifth jumps to such an intimate degree that it needs to be an instinctual response. “The Mouth” reminds me of the B- and C-Sides of Chapter 6 of Celeste: a long vertical room full of spikes that your character falls through while using the occasional boost to momentarily defy gravity. This is where I drew the line in Celeste, and it’s where I draw the line in JIGGLY ZONE. I did not defeat “The Mouth”.
In the room after the mouth, you have to use every single one of JIGGLER’s movement power ups akin to such a precise degree, you might as well be doing surgery on a grape. One of the platforming challenges in the final room can be described as follows: You have to first turn into a ghost to get stuck inside of a block, become corporeal inside of the block, flip gravity, become a ghost again to jump to land on the bottom of the same block, make a checkpoint (this one’s optional), and then make a four-point jump through a narrow corridor of spikes to land on a block where you then have to repeat the ghost-into-block-to-flip-gravity procedure.
It looks like this:
How did this happen?
How did we get here?
When did JIGGLY ZONE change? Was it always like this?
Why have I spent three hours playing this game?
I think you, yes you, should play JIGGLY ZONE, and try this Masocore experience for yourself. I know I just spent the last 2,500 words talking about hw this game is an affront to the senses, exhibits abusive game design, and all that jazz, but please trust me. You gotta play JIGGLY ZONE, DUDE.
And why am I advocating for JIGGLY ZONE despite considering a strong portion of its design “abusive”?
Simple, the game is free. I mean, like, you clicked the link at the start of this page, right? Like, you could’ve just started playing right now. You could be playing the game right now for all I know.
So let me just say I acknowledge that if I had spent even a dollar or two on this game only to met with an assault on my senses, I wouldn’t find JIGGLY ZONE as amusing as I do. That’s right, I find abusive game design funny, even when I’m the butt of the joke. It also really helps that JIGGLY ZONE is a single player experience without any additional strings attached. Given that 1. JIGGLY ZONE is free, and 2. no one is expecting me to play JIGGLY ZONE, let alone beat it, I’m able to approach JIGGLY ZONE with an open mind. And I will admit, I really did have a lot of fun playing JIGGLY ZONE for about 80% of my time spent with it. It’s only when I started traversing the rooms in the Crimson Isles that I decided “no, I really don’t want to subject myself to this nonsense anymore”, and quit. I didn’t beat JIGGLY ZONE. I instead watched raocow do it in his Let’s Play of the game, and boy I tell you that was the right call.
The game being free also allows sylvie and hubol to explore their game design vision to their heart’s content. JIGGLY ZONE can be abusive and crude and full of silly midi tunes because it is a piece of art. It is challenging and makes the person playing the game feel a kind of experience that they cannot get anywhere else. It is an opt-in period of surreal, absurd, and well-crafted gaming. I don’t think you can find a game quite like JIGGLY ZONE anywhere else. This is your “no-strings attached” opportunity to experience the Masocore genre, where the only thing you give in return is your time.
Look buddy, if you’re one of those “games aren’t what they used to be” video makers or watchers, you owe it to yourself to play a (fairly) modern game made purely on the backs of two passionate creators unbeholden to financial constraints 7. Games are more than a third-person cinematic action adventure. They’re romps through ugly colorful worlds with JIGGLER, who has five jumps.
If nothing else, Bennett Foddy likes this game. And if that doesn’t do it for you, then I don’t know what will.
https://youtu.be/sdtehRUfzWc&t=13↩︎
(just how I like my video game)↩︎
I really would’ve rather said “lolrandom” but we live in an era of the internet where this concept is no longer widely understood… and isn’t that a little sad? Even if you didn’t really like Katy t3h PeNgU1N oF d00m?↩︎
https://www.giantbomb.com/masocore/3015-1165/↩︎
For more discussion on this idea, consider watching Catherine Liu’s 2022 talk “What is Trauma in a Digital Age?”↩︎
this also applies to hit 2023 release Void Stranger.↩︎
