The Floor Is Jelly Review

Indie puzzle-platformers are hardly a rarity on Steam, so knowing which ones are worth playing can be a struggle. You'd also be forgiven for dismissing The Floor is Jelly due to its childish-sounding name. However, give the game a chance and you'll be rewarded with a fun, challenging and polished experience.

The Floor is Jelly opens with an abstract scene containing blobs of jelly floating around in space. The blobs slowly begin to take shape and transform into an autumnal environment populated by the game’s protagonist, who looks like a tiny Pac-Man ghost. It's an ambient, minimalist sequence which perfectly sets the tone for the rest of the game.

Straight away it’s obvious that this isn’t a traditional platformer; take a few steps and you’ll notice the floor wobble beneath your feet. Jump and the ground will deform drastically, springing back with speed. By timing your jumps correctly the gelatine surfaces act like a trampoline, allowing for massive leaps off of walls and floors. This keeps the platforming interesting throughout the game, despite the controls being kept to horizontal movement and a jump button.

Levels are structured in a hub-like manner. As you explore a new area, you’ll run into a locked door; to unlock it you'll need to enter three different windows and complete the set of levels found inside. It's quite a basic set-up, but it does the job and the gated design allows for plenty of environmental variety.

Beyond the visual diversity, each set of levels also introduces a new twist to the gameplay. To begin with, you'll be tasked with some jelly-based platforming, but things soon get more complex with puzzles that involve rotating chunks of the levels or surfaces that disappear or reappear when touched. Towards the end of the game things get a bit trippy, as visual artifacts begin to pop up and the world’s physics become warped. The distortions come in waves, each one changing the way the surfaces reacts to the player. These are cool at first, but the jelly soon becomes so out of control that the only way to pass levels is through luck.

There’s no story to speak of in The Floor is Jelly, and the player’s featureless character has no name or backstory. Instead, the game plays more like a sensory journey through its beautiful environments. During your time with the game you’ll visit many varied locations, from the orangey autumnal opening, to rainy overcast sections, and even some outer space levels complete with low gravity.

Each of the locales has its own unique and vibrant colour scheme, and everything is created in a minimalist style that is just great to look at. The titular jelly is also a standout; surfaces wobble, bounce and shake exactly like you'd expect. Things take a turn for the worse by the end of the game however, as the bright colours and extreme level distortion actually hurt my eyes after a while, but the good far outweighs the bad on this one.

The soundtrack, produced by Disasterpeace (best known as the guy behind Fez’s music) is outstanding. Like the visuals, most of the music is minimalistic, and it really adds to the ambience. There are nice audio touches to be found throughout the game, such as musical notes that play dynamically when the player touches certain objects, and the low, bassy sounds of outer space.

Taking around two hours to complete, the £6.99 price tag feels a little steep, and the game’s final sections don’t meet the high standard of the rest. However, if you're looking for a platformer with clever puzzles, gorgeous visuals and a brilliant soundtrack, The Floor is Jelly is for you.