Jump, Step, Step

Help Bob now! Available on Steam!

Description

Jump, Step, Step is a relaxing puzzle game where you help Bob (a robot) find his lost limbs, collecting missing parts to repair a broken spaceship, and then discover what really happened to him.

• Genre: Puzzle, Programming
• Platforms: Xbox One, PC Steam
• Release Date: August 2017
• Developer: LucidRealm
• Publisher: Thundercloud Studio Ltd
• Engine: Unreal Engine 4

The gameplay

The game has a relaxing mood mixed with light-hearted humor. It starts with Bob just waking up in a strange place that looks like a garden floating in the sky, you can hear birds singing and a waterfall whispering quietly from a distance together with peaceful music in the background. However, Bob can only move by rolling on the floor that’s because he lost all his limbs somehow. Both “The Players” don’t have any clue about anything… Luckily they spot Bob’s leg just some distance ahead.

This is where the game’s puzzle mechanic comes in. It is inspired by a famous toy called “Big Trak” that I had when I was 7 or 8. It was a six wheels rover with a set of buttons on its back, each corresponding to a command like go forward, turn right, turn left, launch propeller, fire gun..etc. and when you press those buttons, the rover won’t do those things immediately but put them into a queue. Then only when you press the “Play” button would the rover do those commands in sequence.

Coming back to Bob’s world, to help Bob retrieve his legs so he can walk properly, you will need to set up a sequence and send it to Bob, just like how you would play the rover toy mentioned earlier. In this particular challenge, the correct sequence is a series of turning right 90 degrees, turning left 90 degrees, and going one tile forward.

Later in the game, you will face much more tricky areas that challenge your sequence planning skill.

In this story, Bob and The Player are child-like characters so their dialogues are light-hearted humorous. Sometimes The Player will make fun of the fact that Bob breakdowns quite often. Some other time, Bob will get frustrated as he thinks he does all the hard work and The Player just doesn’t help him at all.