Jade Order

Genre: Puzzle

Players: 1

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Review:

Jade Order, released on Nintendo Switch in 2022, is a character-based Puzzle game where players need to hunt down and eliminate enemies on a lined grid, but may only approach those enemies from the rear or the sides.

Jade Order makes use of some absolutely gorgeous pixel art 2D visuals depicting a dark world with beautiful green and purple islands on a starlit lake in front of futuristic towers and an eclipse, with the game backed by a nice, subdued futuristic synthesized soundtrack. The use of color, the reflections in the water, and the overall look of the game is quite striking, if a bit repetitive at times. My only real complaint here is that the character designs of the enemies isn’t quite as distinctive as I’d like (different enemies sometimes look a bit like each other), and for some of them it’s not always easy to see which direction they’re facing, which is an important element of the gameplay.

The gameplay here is fairly straightforward, and players must work their way through enemies without encountering any of them face-on, all with a turn-based style of play where moving enemies move at the same time you do. Players can earn bonuses by doing so quickly or by getting to the “treasure” in each level, but otherwise this is fairly simple. The game later adds abilities and new enemy types that add complexity into the game, but generally things are simple enough that there doesn’t seem like a ton of different ways to tackle each level, it’s more about spotting what to do, and doing it.

This linear design limits the game somewhat, but I’d say my biggest complaint about Jade Order is the stiff and frustrating controls, that make players move a cursor and then confirm to make each and every movement, something that is made more frustrating because of an input delay that makes you wait each time you make a movement. This causes unnecessary tedium and makes the simple gameplay feel like more of a chore than it needs to.

Overall, Jade Order is a decent Puzzle game that has its issues, but overall it’s fairly unspectacular save for its excellent presentation. If you’re looking to add another character-based puzzle game to your collection, and see this one on a good sale, you may find it worth a look, but it’s not a game I would say is a must-have entry in the genre.

tl;dr – Jade Order is a character-based Puzzle game where players must move their character into enemies only from the back or sides. It’s an absolutely gorgeous game, but not an especially noteworthy one, and the movement controls are unnecessarily frustrating. Not a bad entry in the genre, but far from an essential one.

Grade: C+

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