The Floor is Jelly Review
By Omar (@siegarettes)
- The Floor is Jelly
- Developer - Ian Snyder
- Publisher - Ian Snyder
- PC (Windows)
- Available direct from developer and on Steam
The Floor is Jelly is part of what I like to call “gallery games”. It sits alongside titles such as PixelJunk Eden, Nidhogg, and Proteus as games that would feel just as at home in a gallery as the screen in front of you. It’s a game that takes the titular concept and builds a world around the idea, inviting you to explore and understand it.
Jelly’s artwork is a purposeful understatement. It betrays the hand of a design graduate (which looking at creator Ian Snyder’s portfolio I suspect him of being).It plays in pleasing geometry and vibrant color palettes. Its world is populated with small organisms that hint at a surreal ecosystem. Flowers bloom beneath your feet and the croaks of frogs fill caves. It gives a real sense of space to what could have otherwise been a very inactive and lonely world.
Meanwhile, Disasterpeace (Rich Vreeland) returns to compose much of the soundtrack and showcase a nuanced mastery of atmosphere. It most immediately brings to mind his work on FEZ, breezy atmospheres with slow progressions. While FEZ primarily operated in digital to accompany its cubic world, his work here is organic, ebbing and moving like the floor beneath you. It is as integral as the visuals to giving form to the world, and alongside the excellent sound design it speaks to a real sense of collaboration between the two.
Even between the art and sound, Jelly’s strongest element is confidence. Its confident enough in the inherent curiosity in the act of play that it never has to explain itself with heavy handed tutorials. Your basic actions never change, you simply move and jump. It’s surprisingly subversive of your expectations. Often when you think you’ve begun to understand it, Jelly will open into a new area, bring a new color palette and change the way the world operates. The Floor is Jelly doesn’t waste its titular gimmick. It toys with its physics to give a thorough exploration of its mechanics. This is the most realized puzzle game since Valve’s original Portal. The Floor is Jelly brings this all to a head during its final areas, which results in an interplay between music, game, and the player that is best left with little said about it.
Jelly is a testament to how great design is often 99% invisible. It moves the player in a way that keeps them consistently drawn into the space it creates. It does that so invisibly that it makes it difficult to understand how what exactly is compelling you unless you are looking for it. That makes it more standout when the game falters. At times the organic physics don’t quite cooperate with you and disturb the kinetic momentum that propels you forward. At one point I also encountered a game breaking bug that forced me to restart the entire game. Thankfully, it was near the start of the game and didn’t cost me much progress, but it was frustrating nonetheless.
Bug aside, these feel like nitpicks at most. The Floor is Jelly has the grace of being an intelligently designed game. It’s a game whose qualities aren’t easily showcased by videos and promotional material. In a way, it feels like an exploration of play, something whose joys come from feeling, where understanding comes from the motion of our hands rocking with the game. It’s a little piece of happiness that I’m happy to come across.