Jump, Step, Step

Genre: Puzzle

Players: 1

.

Review:

Jump, Step, Step is a Puzzle Game released in 2017 on PC and Xbox One, ported to Nintendo Switch in 2020, then to PlayStation 4 in 2021. This game has players controlling a robot by entering in a series of commands for it to follow.

The visuals here make use of some pretty simple 3D visuals with some cel shading for characters, backed by annoying cutesy music that does little to enhance the game. If this game is going to draw you in, it won’t be doing it with the presentation.

The gameplay at its core has players solving puzzles in a way that’s roughly like a very simple programming language, even including things like GOTO loops and conditional commands. It’s far from the only game on Nintendo Switch to do this, but it is still a fun take on this sorta’ formula.

Where it falls apart is that some of the rules you can use are either too poorly-explained or behave inconsistently, such as one command that has your robot waiting until he’s next to walkable ground. Sometimes it works as intended, and sometimes he’ll just go right ahead even if the ground in front of him isn’t walkable, only for it to become walkable? It’s very odd, and I’m honestly not sure what’s going on here.

Given that these are the tools through which you have to solve the game’s puzzles, those tools being unreliable and needlessly confusing results in Jump, Step, Step being a Puzzle game that fluctuates from a pretty good one to a lousy one entirely based on whether your commands actually work. With this being the case, I can’t recommend it, especially when other games like 7 Billion Humans do it much better. Get that instead.

tl;dr – Jump, Step, Step is a Puzzle Game that has players controlling a robot by entering in a series of commands for it to follow. It’s a fun concept when it works, but unfortunately your commands are sometimes confusing and unreliable, which really damages the core gameplay. There are better options for this sort of thing on Nintendo Switch, so I can’t recommend this one.

Grade: C-

^{You can support eShopperReviews on Patreon! Please click HERE to become a Sponsor!}

^{This month’s sponsors are Jamie and His Cats, Ben, Ilya Zverev, Andy Miller, Johannes, Jaka, Jared Wark, Gabriel Coronad-Medina, Francis Obst, Kristoffer Wulff, and Seth Christenfeld. Thank you for helping to keep the reviews coming!}