Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Online

Is this a vanilla, traditional level? Well, sort of, yes. Enemies are the most basic available—thematically, if not mechanically—it’s an official tileset with the standard music, there’s nothing wild about the background use. Slaz even sacrifices an entire background layer just to controlling the speeds of the textured background, rather than let a single line of scripting take care of it. There’s not a lot to describe on these fronts because yes, this is in fact how Carrotus (or Easter) tiles go together—though, to be clear, a very strong example of the form.

But sort of, at the same time, no, tradition is being bucked here. There’s a question that lived me with the whole time I went through the level: what are all these coins for? I got to the end of the level, beat the perfunctory boss battle, and still didn’t know. I had to go in a second time to discover that there was a coin warp I simply missed the first time. Even if you do better than me and manage to notice the warp right away, I think you’re still unlikely to have enough coins the first time you encounter it. Especially because you can’t really know in advance what the target number is.

So you go back and play the level again, this time maybe somehow doing enough exploring to collect all the coins. But why? What’s the reward? Nothing too much. The reward does speed things up a bit, but if you’re replaying the level, you’ve probably already beaten it. You don’t actually need the reward to beat it. You could make a completionist argument, sure, but is it possible—and bear me with me here—the goal of playing the video game is simply to have fun?

Because this makes a lot of things about the layout make sense. This level trusts completely that you want to collect goodies and find secrets. Sometimes you even have to find secrets to progress, unless there’s yet another alternate route that I missed that would work as an alternative. But also there are large areas that aren’t necessary at all. Sometimes because they’re alternate routes to the next stage in the journey, but sometimes large areas that don’t go anywhere, that just loop in on themselves and contain goodies and secrets and things. The goal of playing these sections is playing these sections.

And collecting coins in them, I guess.

Anyway, those were the thoughts going through my head, deprived of sleep as it is this weekend. I can’t promise they have anything to do with Slaz’s actual intent with this level, which has a lot to recommend it even if you don’t stop and get confused about the meaning of coins or whatever. Slaz’s levels tend to have lots of little microsecrets and these are in full force here: some are little holes in walls, some are in the floor, some are more complicated. But they tend to be signaled. There tends to be some visual sign "secret here! try to find it!" on the wall. It’s something I associate with Slaz a lot and it works well here.

In general, this level is filled with moment-to-moment stuff. You enter a new room and suddenly you could climb those eggs, you could go up that slope, you could stomp that block. At least one of those options will probably help you progress. There’s a whole lot of use of vertical space, including clever uses of springs, and even some swinging platforms that it’s actually worth paying attention to. There’s very little flat ground, there are not dull rooms where you walk to the right while shooting lizards, there are not moments where you purely turn your brain off because it takes no work to decide what to do next.

And in that regard, this is not a usual traditional level.