Hey, look. It's a point & click by way of Dragon's Lair, lovingly hand-drawn, little quicktime sequences here and there. Tons of impish fantasy charm, really nails the whimsical fairy tale vibe. Sure, there's some inconsistencies, some odd choices here and there that stand out, but nothing egregious.

And then it cashes in, tosses a little coin of dread into the well. I quite literally swore quietly under my breath when it happened. This was going to be one of those games, a game with a southpaw hookshot under its belt. To Tsioque's credit, it spends that coin well, plays off its strengths, addresses its perceived weaknesses. A welcome surprise in a game already enjoyed.

I get it. You see a game that's top down, destructible terrain, manually detonated bombs. That'sBomberman, right? Wrong.

This is Chip's Challenge, Stealth Edition.

And what's here works reasonably well. It's a slow start, for sure, and the game as a whole is distinctly a bit underbaked. Achievement sets for each level are nice, but the lack of one for accomplishing all of these optional objectives in one go is notably missing. There's speed-based leaderboards bolstered by collectibles that shave seconds off your time, but those collectibles are only found on one map in each area. There are achievements for killing all guards on a map, but that is always much easier than the pacifist runs. And so on.

The game is short, though, and has that distinct charm of a successful 2012 Ludum Dare project. A sequel would have been ideal, a game that learns its lessons and implements them from step one. But I had a good enough time to do almost every optional achievement, to collect all the collectables. The amateur presentation, the genuine hype over the music change in the last area, the charm of seeing one guy and some friends basically doing the best they can because they love video games and a proper dev shot at the end of the credits. Good stuff all around, just not great.

There's nothing more damning you can say about Jill of the Jungle as a platformer than to note that Sonic the Hedgehog 2 came out the same year. And yet.

This is a bit of gaming history that is difficult to explain. You're young. Maybe your dad has a computer, maybe you have an aging computer lab at school. PCs are different beasts, expensive, a world apart. And this game, it's shareware. It's fine, completely legal, to pass it out on floppy disks. Encouraged, even. So you play it at school, or on your dad's computer in his den, or at a friends' house before bringing home a copy. It's clunkier than Mario, slower than Sonic. But it's available.

And there's a certain charm. A young Tim Sweeney, establishing a second hit for Epic Megagames after ZZT. Cocksure, arrogant, taunting other game franchises within the confines of this sophomore success by… picking up apples that provide news bulletins? The game croons "YEEAAAH" when you pick up a key, a guitar riff for those apples. Throwing a dagger next to a wall makes a record scratch. The sound test mocks its own contents as terrible. It's odd, unfiltered, the work of a young man.

More's the charm. There's nothing outstanding about Jill of the Jungle, but there's plenty to love. The jump animation that faces the screen, the excellent run cycle, one-off transformations, confident declarations on a wall that an upcoming section is tricky. It's amateur, earnest, easy and forgivable for its faults because its archaic contents are presented with an excess of bluster and, perhaps, a bit of actual panache.