Of all the franchises I expected to come back from the dead, Jelly Car was not one of them. Especially since Disney owns the intellectual property, and last time I checked, there are neither any Jelly Car attractions at Disneyland nor a Jelly Car cinematic universe. I have to assume that someone at Walaber has some serious dirt on someone very high up at Disney's headquarters, because I cannot fathom any other explanation for how they could get away with developing and publishing something with this much heart and soul without their corporate overlords scrubbing all humanity from the product and replacing it with Mickey Mouse DLC. Even with the obviously improved production values compared to a trilogy of decade-old mobile games, it's still painfully obvious that Jelly Car Worlds is the product of a comparatively tiny team of passionate developers with an immense deal of love for their abstract indie game about a two-dimensional car made out of rubbery sponge. The game embraces the simplicity of it's premise with open arms and runs with it; each level (usually) leverages the 2D physics sandbox in a new (or at least different) way, albeit in intuitive ways that are expansions of previously-established mechanics rather than feeling pressured to introduce a new gimmick every two or three levels. Repetition usually isn't a problem that weighs the game down... usually. That 2D sandbox usually manifests in the form of simple yet wildly varying platforming challenges. Your gelatinous automobile cannot jump by itself, so navigating levels requires leveraging both your vehicle's natural inclination towards bouncing harmlessly off of everything and the myriad power-ups the game introduces every eighth level. Let's get this out of the way up in front: Jelly Car is not a hardcore tilt-a-bike game like Happy Wheels or the Trials series, and it is not a high-speed platformer like Sonic or Super Monkey Ball. Jelly Car is (usually) a much more chill, meditative experience. This is not to say that you will not go fast nor that you will not have your reaction times challenged; it's just that Jelly Car is much more content to let the player's enjoyment of the game emerge naturally from it's Jell-O physics. The game's willingness to embrace it's own simplicity carries over to it's aesthetics as well. At it's core, the game's art style can best be described as a programmer compensating for their programmer art by deliberately rendering the game world as a world of abstract shapes and doodles drawn onto various scraps of paper. Despite the addition of textures that actually look like different materials and post-processing effects that would've never been implemented back in the iPod Touch days, the game still never pretends to be something it's not. Err, well, at least I think it doesn't. The sound design contributes greatly towards this image of humility — every sound effect in the game is just one developer making funny noises into a microphone. Every sound effect. Related to the above is the immense degree of customization options available to the player. Not only are you allowed to draw your own liveries and wheels for your car, but you're also allowed to record your own sound effects, too — so you can have the game yell obscenities at you in your own voice every time you fall off the level, if you so wish. I am once again absolutely baffled as to how this level of creative freedom has been enabled in a product shipped by the corporate black hole that is Disney. By all rights, every middle manager involved in Disney's software branch should be screeching in horror at the possibility that some thirteen-year-old is going to draw, ahem, reproductive anatomy in their cartoon platformer. Speaking of which: there's just straight-up a level editor in this game. A quite advanced one, at that — I suspect the only reason this game does not have Steam Workshop support or any other form of custom level sharing is because Disney knew that people would use such features to show political imagery or depictions of reproductive anatomy to other people. It's really a shame, because I would love to see the rubbery Rube Goldberg devices people could come up with. Now... most of this review has been positive — if not immensely baffled — about this game, and that positive attitude does accurately reflect my thoughts on the game as a whole, but alas, nothing is perfect... and neither is this game's grappling hook power-up. Grappling hooks are almost always a huge boon to any video game, provided that the player can accurately and easily control them, which is not the case in Jiggly Carriage Planets. The game already wasn't immune to occasionally throwing some abrupt difficulty spikes at the player (some of which can thankfully be skipped), but the moment you unlock the grappling hook and enter World 7, you should expect the game to become a lot more... fiddly. This goes double if you intend to find World 8's secret exit to unlock it's respective secret car — I will even go so far as to claim that it is the only point where the game's intentionally inconsistent jelly physics became genuinely frustrating. Fortunately, I had the classic levels to retreat to whenever I needed a break from the main campaign's last quarter. The entirety of the original Jelly Car trilogy was patched into the game for free alongside music from the first two games. I once again have no clue how Disney didn't force this to be paid DLC, considering that each previous game was monetized separately from one another. Regardless, these classic levels are a fantastic inclusion regardless of whether or not you've played the original Jelly Car games; if you have, then getting to play Jelly Derby or Green Cave again after a decade is all but certain to evoke that thought-terminating sinful pleasure we call nostalgia, and if you haven't, then you get to see how humble Jelly Car's origins are and how far the series progressed prior to it's decade-long dormancy and subsequent surprise revival. I've been waffling on for over a thousand words at this point, and I still haven't covered all of this game's features — I've only mentioned secret cars once, I failed to mention that every single level has a secret exit in addition to the hub worlds also having secret exits, and at no point have I mentioned the fiendishly brutal Skull Levels nor the Long Jump levels — which can be taken as a testament to just how much content is contained in this humble little package. At the time of this review, I've already sunk a good ten hours into this game, and I haven't even finished all of the classic levels yet. There's a good couple dozen hours of enjoyment to be derived from this game if you're the kind of player who likes to fully complete chill little games about silly little cars with the occasional massive difficulty spike — and all of this can be yours for less money than most modern AAA games charge you for microtransactions these days. ... and if I see so much a single passing reference to Frozen patched into this game in the future, I am going to go f***ing postal, so help me God—--
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