Thanks to Red Art Games for the review code

Title: Jubilee
System: Xbox Series X
Price: $9.99
Release Date: 02/09/2024

Story

In this platformer, you take control of a girl who must make a prison escape! A short text intro is all you get before going right into the game, and NPCs scattered about help piece together info about the world and each of its areas. Just know that you’re a girl in need of a prison break and having to dodge a lot of crazy obstacles to do so!

Presentation

At first glance in screenshots, this felt like the stuff I covered time and time again on this site, with retro throwback graphics featuring simple 16 bit sprites inspired by the SNES, yet again. And yeah, for the most part Jubilee fits that bill, but the backgrounds are pretty and the sprites look fine, with easy tells on what is an obstacle and what isn’t, so the visuals get the job done.

The music on the other hand was a pleasant surprise. While the initial areas of Jubilee have pretty simple tracks associated to them, later areas are more impressive, with the Mountain Mine’s theme becoming a huge favorite of mine, and very fitting of the more difficult tone the game portrays the further you explore it.

Gameplay

Jubilee is a one button platformer, and outside of moving with the D-pad, that’s it. No power ups, no bonus features or secret techniques, nothing but the face buttons being able to pull off your normal jump and a small mid-air boost for extra air time.

Thus, the main goal of the game is find your way out of the prison and through the sprawling underground world, using your reflexes and platforming prowess to collect gems, safely navigate to the next checkpoint and try to not die to the many, many hazards set on stopping you. The game is pretty nonlinear, almost invoking metroidvania vibes, but considering how there are no obstacles blocking you from the other areas of the map, (save for one final challenge area that’s gated behind a bunch of gems) it really is less of a metroidvania with upgrades and progression, and more of a world that just feels like one giant level.

All the areas connect together pretty seamlessly and warping between them is easy upon reaching the bird statues hidden across the world, so the lone, singular obstacle that could possibly cause you to have to take a different route or avoid one area of the map altogether is your own platforming skills. No matter how many gems you collect or how far you go, you’re still stuck with the basic jump and spin, and the game is, much to my pleasant surprise, delightfully designed around that one button. The controls in Jubilee are just tight. Really tight. Movement feels very precise and super instant, and the jump height varies depending on how long you hold the button, so even doing small hops between beds of spikes is an easy feat once you get the hang of things. The brief spin you can pull off is enough to boost you ever so slightly in the air, and being able to nail a long gap by timing that right is incredibly satisfying.

Honestly, I was expecting at some point in the game to run right into a brick wall of difficulty that would take my comfortable habits with this control scheme and throw it down the drain, since even some of the more well known rage platformers have stages that are just beyond absurd and cruel with checkpoints or lives. Not the case in Jubilee! Checkpoints are aplenty, you have infinite tries, and each gap between checkpoints, even in the hardest area of the entire game feels perfectly fair and well crafted, making each miss give off a “one more try” sensation, leading me to not only wanting to just get around the full world map, but find every secret I possibly could, whether that be secret pages, missing animals, or all 999 of the gems scattered around the game world. Luckily, the game has a catalog that lets you track how many gems you have left in each area, but the other items you have to seek out all by yourself.

That feeling of free exploration and just being able to go wherever and having my skill be the only limit was really, really satisfying, and I have to admit this game fully hooked me right in; in no time I was searching every spot I could for a place out of the ordinary to find a secret, or trying difficult, optional challenges again and again until I got the gems and made it back to a checkpoint safely to bank them. Even the hardest one that made me want to pull my hair out, felt more than fair enough to the point that when I did finally succeed, I felt a relief I hadn’t felt since trying the hardest challenges of VVVVVV, and the fact the game autosaves at every checkpoint and is very generous while staying true to being a difficult game really makes the curve feel excellent. Seriously, I haven’t played a difficult game this satisfying in a long while.

Of course, if 100%ing all the gems and the map isn’t enough for you, there are a few extra options here, and I appreciated those. There’s a UI toggle that shows you a total in-game time, for the sake of speedrunning purposes, and there’s even a secondary unlockable character where his main gimmick is that he’s stuck on a skateboard and slides around a lot. Playing as him is honestly the only time the game feels remotely unfair, and even then I found myself eventually getting to grips with his gameplay, even if he gives big Luigi vibes as a result of being so slippery.

The whole experience took me roughly 3 hours to 100% all the gems and the map once, and I absolutely loved every last minute of it, and promptly went ahead and sped to the end as the second character in roughly 30 minutes to see how my speedrunning prowess would work out; I honestly wish this game has some sort of way to keep track of your best clear times, as being able to compete in some sort of leaderboard would really give this game even more fun replay value, as I can definitely see this being a great game for the likes of GDQ and such.

Conclusion

In the end, I really, really enjoyed my time with Jubilee, and it caught me off guard for sure. There have been a lot of one button platformers before, and tons more attempts at precision platformers, but almost all of them had some sort of baggage or flaw that made them miss the mark or not feel as fair as a challenging game like that should be.

Thankfully, Jubilee nails the difficulty, with even the most tense of rooms feeling doable with enough determination and persistence. I was able to 100% the main game in three hours, and those three hours just flew on by and kept me engaged the entire time, just due to how much in awe I was at the well designed world. Even the hardest, most insane challenge in the game wasn’t enough to make me want to rage quit, since the game is designed in just a way that makes it easy to keep trying again and again until you finally get past that rough area, in a way I haven’t felt with a 2D platformer since Celeste or Mutant Mudds Super Challenge. Even the sillier, actual rage inducing secret character was fun to goof around with for some extra replay value!

Throw in some speedrunner friendly options, plenty of routes to take to beat the game to your liking, and polish everywhere you go, and you have yourselves a sleeper hit that I am more than happy to have given a closer look. A lot of throwback platformers try to add intense difficulty by just being outright cruel. Jubilee is one of those rare games that nails the intense difficulty by just being simple enough to want to master, and being well designed in a way to make you want to reach the next checkpoint. Truly one of the first great console games of 2024.

I give Jubilee a 9 out of 10.