Jimmy Divided

Game jam competitions are usually great places for new ideas to be born, especially if the themes are ingenious enough to facilitate new designs. Thus, indie developers get the chance to practice their skills and make a name for themselves at the same time. Moreover, other developers can see new concepts and try to include them in their own projects somehow.

Jimmy Divided is an interesting puzzle-platformer in which you play the role of a character that can change between roles and take advantage of multiple special abilities because of this. Your goal is to pass the levels by utilizing those abilities as efficiently as possible, which is a combination of both puzzles and tough platforming challenges that require good reflexes.

The game’s main gimmick is the fact that you can switch between identities and make use of two different special abilities. As such, one allows you to teleport over short distances and bypass obstacles like walls, while the other allows you to throw explosive balls in order to disrupt the environment and cause a few chain reactions. They are both tricky to use properly, and not necessarily because of the puzzles.

As you might suspect, the fact that it was designed in a matter of days means that there are plenty of issues to watch out for, but some of them have quite an impact on the gameplay. Hence, the teleport ability sometimes doesn’t work as intended, and the aiming system for the explosive projectiles is not the most accurate out there, even if you learn to anticipate their curved trajectory.

The graphics are actually quite nice, even if they are very repetitive. It’s to be expected, on the other hand, because there was no time for custom artwork or too much work in the texture department. The level design is pretty simple and to the point as well, although that shouldn’t be a problem, given the fact that most of your time is spent trying to navigate around the obstacles.

All things considered, Jimmy Divided is quite interesting, at least when it comes to the way you use both characters to navigate the environments. However, it’s clearly unpolished, so don’t expect high-quality stuff in regards to gameplay and level design.