The Floor is Jelly

A game by Ian Snyder for PC and Mac, originally released in 2014.

The Floor is Jelly posits a rather fun question… What if the floor were made of Jell-O, and moreover, what if that Jell-O wobbled about when you stepped on it, jiggling itself and everything around you, allowing you to jump onto it from any height, and even becoming a makeshift trampoline as a result? It certainly allows for more interesting possibilities than the age old children’s game of The Floor is Lava.

Even though the game is all about bopping across various gelatinous surfaces, it actually begins with a single wobbly blue ring floating in space. In each corner of the screen is a white dot, and touching the first of these dots causes a collection of colored blobs to stream into the playfield. You are free to bounce around between them, slide over and repel them away, or let them push you along. Touching the other dots brings in more of these blobs with a current moving them around.

These blobs are actually comprised of the same colors that make up the first world, and sliding over the last white dot causes everything to move downward, with the blobs – blue, white, red, orange, and yellow – settling to become the rubbery blue ground, white background, and autumnal flora. And at last, a tiny little being is dropped onto a blue surface that bounces when it lands.

You control the little thing who appears to be nothing more than a body and a pair of legs… but your character isn’t nearly as important as the world it inhabits. The first few levels allow you to try out the game mechanics and act as a playground for you to experiment with the unusual environment.

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 2014, Ian Snyder, Mac, PC