Jump, Step, Step

Unfortunately, I’m not very good at doing what I say I’m going to do. Jump, Step, Step was added to my wishlist a while back and it came up in a sale so I bought it. However, in a desperate attempt to not get a further build up of sale games I played this one straight away.

Jump, Step, Step is a puzzle game where you have to enter commands to get the game’s protagonist, Bob, from somewhere to somewhere else in order to build a spaceship to escape the block world you have landed on.

The gameplay consists of entering commands into the game which tell Bob to move forward, jump, turn left or right and later on, do all sorts of complex shit that a standard human brain would not be able to compute just by looking at Bob’s position. You have to get him from the start position to the end position in one go just by looking at his start and end locations.

It’s a great idea in principle but it suffers for two things and one of them really pissed me off. The first is the camera angle the game is set from. Everything is slanted at a 45 degree angle which makes working out left and right more challenging than it should be. The second is a killer. There is one part of the game where there are moving problems you have to get across to carry on. Now, the game is run from a user command prompt so you can enter the right commands but if you don’t press ‘execute’ at the right time, Bob will die. This is absurdly stupid as it’s down to total luck whether you get across or not.

Graphically and musically, it’s cartoony graphics with god awful music that can only have been designed to irritate.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 10 Achievements

It’s the minimum possible haul for this one and six of them are earned from completing the game but this is easier said than done if you don’t have a guide with the images of the button commands you need to enter.

The amount of trial and error required to get through some of the puzzles must be insane, especially when you have to enter commands depending on which one of four random directions Bob could end up facing. There are more ridiculous commands after this, especially the ones needed to fight Alice at the end, and I won’t even try to explain them.

There are four missable achievements and three of them are sort of related. The first one though, it is at odds with the last one. You are required to die on a spike. Incidentally this was the second achievement I earned and fits with the trial and error philosophy as you have to know what a spike does in order to get passed it.

In between the start and the finish of the game there are two puzzles, including defeating Alice, that have to be done in a certain amount of moves or less – easy with a guide.

The last one is for completing the whole game in a perfect go without making any mistakes. Flashes of Outlast came back to me for this one, especially with the sliding platforms mentioned earlier that have a tendency to randomly kill you. In addition to that, the button configurations get really complicated and one wrong move will void the achievement. Okay, so its not the same intensity or difficulty as Outlast but it’s still frustrating to fuck it up after 45 minutes of gameplay.

Downloadable Content – N/A

It’s technically possible to get all of the achievements in Jump, Step, Step in less than an hour but this was not the case for me. While the premise was good, I didn’t think it was very well executed and the sliding platforms was a deal breaker, especially in such a short game.