Jump King Review (PC)

I’m slightly worried at this point that, if I do choose to pull out the last-remaining hairs from my scalp, then I won’t have a fighting chance to regain whatever locks I have left in this thirty-something year old body. But it’s testing me, alright — the jumps, the barbarity of it all, and the loose promise of there being a “Hot Babe” at the summit. If we’re being real, it would make more sense to abandon all hopes and park it. Yet, there is something pushing me to repeat the same mistakes. I don’t want to find that so-called Babe; I just want to prove a point that, if I can take a cauldron, a hammer, and a half-naked moron to the precipice of a cliff, then I can, in theory, shove a knight up a similar path.

Jump King has an awful habit of overcompensating. On paper, it should be an easy idea to translate—to put a desperately lustful protagonist on a seemingly “noble” quest to win the hand of a damsel in distress. But, it quickly loses sight of that and instead opts to take a different path. The Babe in question still holds a significant role in the story, but the events that take place between the underbelly and the pinnacle are anything but noble and heroic. In reality, you are not the knight in shining armor that the world wants; you are an idiotic leapfrog who cannot comprehend the art of jumping. You are, for a lack of a better description, a desperate act who probably shouldn’t be on the front page, to begin with.

It almost sounds too easy, to squeeze a trigger and to time a series of jumps in a two-dimensional world. The fact of the matter, however, is that Jump King is anything but an easy exercise. It isn’t easy, mainly due to the fact that it doesn’t hold your hand, and that it harbors an awful habit of laughing at you when you accidentally vault in the wrong direction and have to complete your ascent from scratch. Behind the veil, it dangles a “smoking hot babe” on a stick in front of you, yet it chooses to keep them from falling into your palm. But of course, all you can do is try, try, and try again. There’s a love story here somewhere, but Jump King doesn’t want you to read it. Simply, it just wants to hit you over the head with the back of the book.

The mechanics aren’t all that difficult to navigate in Jump King. In fact, most of the game is about, well, jumping. With one hand, you hold down a button to increase the power of your jump, and with the other you aim your idiotic knight to a platform or another obstacle that can bring you closer towards the apex. If you look at it that way, it seems like an easy-going gig. But, there’s a catch: if you miss a jump, or if you fall, then you must complete your ascent again, either from a platform that is significantly lower than your previous point, or, in a worst case scenario, at the very bottom of the in-game world. And no, you don’t have a safety net to protect you from losing your progress.

As there are no checkpoints to track your progress or auto-save features to keep you from losing hours of work, what you essentially have in your hand here is a rage-inducing experience that can (and probably will) get your heart pumping when you least expect it. More often than not, you will fail, plummet, and ultimately abandon all hope of ever reaching the summit. But, on the rarest of occasions, you will time your jump just right and, with a little bit of luck, find something that is worth holding out for, be it a new pixel-puffed biome, a slightly larger “safety net” or an obstacle that is significantly less likely to exhaust your patience.

On the bright side, Jump King does have some great level design. Granted, it’s quite difficult to appreciate its fine details when you’re barreling through it faster than the speed of light — but you get the point. While it is mechanically impossible, it does make an effort to at least keep you company with some classic, pixel-like visuals and a fitting score that matches the old-school arcade vibe. Again, it’s often hard to celebrate its greatest strengths, given that it spends more time trying to infuriate the populace than spoon feed you lighthearted bits and pieces. But, it’s the thought that counts, I think.

There’s a niche game here that most people will hate. That being said, there is also an annoyingly engaging experience that, weirdly, is likely to resonate with the average Getting Over It fanatic. Chances are, if you enjoy stress-inducing platforming games that prefer to bite your hand off than hold it, then you will more than likely “enjoy” booting a knight up to the tippy top of this disastrously complex spire. In general, though, I think we can all agree that, babe or no babe, nobody should lose their hair over a damsel in distress. But maybe that’s just me. Maybe I’m just too afraid to spend all that long fighting for something that will never happen with the little hair I have left.

Verdict

Jump King is as equally infuriating as it is uninviting — but that’s sort of the point. With as little as a loose plot about a knight, a babe, and the insurmountable burden of an unpredictably large spire, it quickly puts all of the pieces of the puzzle in place and asks you to compile them in a way that doesn’t result in a loss of hair. Given that it is a rage game, however, the odds of you tearing the hairs from your scalp are pretty high. Look beyond that, though, and you might just find something that’s worth holding out for here. A babe, a brief moment of happiness, or the bragging rights to smugly dangle over those who can’t even find the first foothold.