Indiana Jones and the dungeon of the spike god

Sometimes, pictures are better than words. Since I lack the skill and time to draw a picture, I'll just describe it for you: Imagine a dungeon of endless, stringed together rooms, filled with spikes, spikes, spikes, then some other traps and even more spikes. Right, that's Jake Skill and the Crystal Quest, an addicting but at the same time frustrating experience.

In Jake Skill and the Crystal Quest (heck, I'll call it JSaCQ from here on.) you take the role of - surprise! - Jake Skill who is on the quest of searching three magical crystals... to... er... save the world from a pollution demon or something. The story in this game is incredibly tacked on and was clearly invented long after development had started to qualify it for Yoyogames comp04.

The gameplay is really good, though. JSaCQ is extremely skilled at jumping. That's basically his only move but it makes for some real cool, fun levels. Every few stages a new "theme" in terms of gameplay is applied and makes each level feel unique and challenging. Leveldesign is creative, requiring a combination of logical thinking and skill to get to the exit. Controls are responsive and do what you want them to but are by no means anything special. A word of warning: This game has some really mean, sometimes downright unfair levels. A checkpoint system is in place allowing you to restart at the beginning of a current room but some rooms are 4 or 5 times the length of others and will therefore have 4 or 5 times the amount of deadly spikes. While JSaCQ has lots of different traps, the most prominent are clearly the pointy metal spikes sticking out of every platform and falling at you from about every imaginable direction. This gets repetitive fast but doesn't make the levels themselves less challenging.

JSaCQ features very ugly menu graphics. The logo is nice but seems displaced compared to the rest of the menu screen. The game graphics are alright, nothing remotely remarkable but at least you can see what is supposed to be what. While Jake himself is not very thoroughly animated, there's all kinds of nice animations in the various traps the game throws at you. By the way, the one-gazillion spikes in this game are very contrasting.

The music is alright. At least as long as you hear it the first time. JSaCQ has about one single background music that is repeated over and over until you wish to jump into the spikes to make it stop. It doesn't, though and there's no option to turn it off. The game has absolutely no sound effects. Jake is probably deaf from the music anyway but this was extremely disappointing as the sound is an important part of any game, especially when you're supposed to be inside a scary tomb.

Closing comments:
JSaCQ is a nice, fun, platform puzzler. It requires skill and logic to successfully save the world from... something. For the most part it's real fun and kind of addicting but some levels will make you repeat over and over until you happen to be lucky enough to make a jump you couldn't before. The presentation side is disappointing but for the great gameplay this is definitely recommended. Just make sure you turn your speakers off.