Jujubes, I’m sure you’re excited to learn, can be two things: they’re either a small, round fruit that grows on the tree of the same name, or they’re little gumdrop candies that you can buy in the Americas. We’re not entirely sure which of the two applies to Jujubos, as the dumpy characters you manouver in this game could be either one of them.
Regardless of which one they’re meant to be, beneath their masks they are Lemmings. The team behind Jujubos must be sizable fans of the 1991 classic. If you’re one too, then you may find something to love in this scruffy little copycat.
Like Lemmings, a jujubo will merrily throw itself off a cliff unless you stop it. These little dudes walk automatically forward until you deign to drop an obstacle in their path. They can also survive only the smallest of drops. If you let your jujubo fall more than three squares, then they smoosh into the ground with a splat (perhaps they are fruit rather than gumdrops). So, you’re their protector, ensuring that none of them die – not a single one, if you want to succeed – on the way to the exit pipe.
Jujubos strips back the Lemmings formula. There are four tools at your disposal, rather than its forebears’ dozen or so. You can dig downwards with a shovel, dig sideways with a pickaxe, plonk down a ladder that the jujubo will subsequently climb, and strap the jujubo to a parachute. All of these are nabbed from Lemmings – there’s not a new ability among them – but they’re the core components for solving a puzzle, so they are just about enough.
(Okay, we’ve quickly put together a Lemmings Jar so that we don’t keep mentioning that other game. One pound goes in every time that we do.)
Since you’re not controlling the jujubos, you’re instead moving a cursor about the game screen. Each of your tools can be dropped in place in the world, and the first jujubo to cross paths with it will immediately use it. A jujubo finding a pickaxe will wield it until they reach a wall, where they will promptly start hammering away. It’s an amendment to the classic, um, game-we-shall-not-name’s controls, and it’s got its advantages and disadvantages.
From an advantage perspective, it means that you can drop down tools in anticipation of your jujubo getting there. You don’t have to glide your cursor over and hope that you’ve clicked on the correct one; you can just drop the tool down and the first one to get there, uses it. It makes Jujubos vastly less fiddly than that other similar game, and you can solve the puzzle before the first jujubo even hits the ground.
The disadvantage is that the tool will often be picked up by the one jujubo you don’t want. If the jujubos are bouncing around in a 1×1 pit, then there’s a fifty-fifty chance that dropping a pickaxe in that pit will get them mining left instead of right. They crisscross each other, and – all too often – we found that a stealthy jujubo would nab the tool before the one we were aiming for. Since there are a limited number of tools per level, it will commonly mean a restart.
The puzzles are deft little buggers. We take no pride in saying that we had to look up a few (damn you, level 27). That’s because everything is stacked against you. There’s no pausing the game before the jujubos emerge out of their pipe: they are out almost immediately, and often there won’t be any walls to hem them in. You can fail within the first two seconds.
Then there are the tool limits. You only get a limited number of shovels, pickaxes, ladders and parachutes per level, and there’s precious little wiggle room for mistakes. If you use a shovel poorly, you may as well tap the button to reset. It firmly pushes Jujubos into the puzzle camp: you can’t muddle through these levels, digging around like Spelunky. Every last move has to be precise. Only on a couple of levels did we finish with some tools still in our tool bag.
While there are only four tools to tinker with, they overlap in satisfying ways. Digging down or digging sideways is a common fork in the road, and your choice will often be determined by how many you’ve got left of each. There are some cracking puzzles here that have you scanning the grid, wondering how you can possibly clear enough earth to reach the pipe.
We mentioned scruffiness, as some behaviours are odd. It takes a little while to figure out the nuances of a ladder, for example. If a jujubo drops onto a ladder, what happens? If you put a ladder in a gap between a platform, what would you expect to occur? There’s often a difference between what happens and what you might have planned for, and it takes more than a few failures to accurately predict how they work.
The issues stack up. There’s the inability to pause the action and weigh up your options; the unpredictability of who will pick up the tool and whether you wanted it to be them; and the funkiness of how each tool works. It leaves Jujubos feeling faintly out of control. We felt like we were trying to scoop up sand in a slotted spoon on occasion. We never quite had total agency over proceedings.
Embrace the chaos, though, and Jujubos has a little twinkle of magic. Some of that twinkle comes from the puzzle design, which is ingenious. Someone has clearly been staring at squared paper all day, working out how four simple tools and a grid of squares can bust your balls. But there’s always a solution, an answer that – once spotted – will have you shrieking ‘Eureka!’ to the skies.
And it’s brutal. It’s not only more difficult than the L-game, but it gets to that difficulty quicker. You are going to need a lucid mind if you want to complete all of its levels without a guide. We felt as bruised as some of the jujubos by the end. We just wanted someone to guide us through the levels.
You have to be in a certain state of mind to enjoy Jujubos. We achieved that state eventually. It’s rock-hard and devious, so you have to be willing to put effort in. You have to get over the hurdle that this is clearly Lemmings (ack, £1 in the jar), but with some annoying barbs. And you need to ignore the rough presentation. Clear all of those, and Jujubos is an ingenious riff on a classic.
