A Puzzle Game for People who Thought Tetris Didn’t Have Enough Maths
Have you ever wished that there was more basic arithmetic in your puzzle games? Yeah, we’re not convinced that we have either. But on the off chance that you’re one of those people, we invite you to whack out your abacus and try Jelly Math.
Jelly Math isn’t too far removed from the shape-sorting games that arrive on the Xbox Store every so often (particularly from publisher Afil Games). These are games like Lucha Align and Habitat Shapes, where you’re given a grid and some shapes running along the bottom of the screen. These Tetris-like blocks need to be placed and rotated onto the grid so that every last one is used up. You’re basically Tangram-ing, or tesselating with a multitude of shapes.
Like Countdown but with Blocks Instead of Jimmy Carr
Jelly Math is the academic version of one of those games. Because fitting the shapes that you’re given into grids is only half of the problem. You see, each of the jelly shapes have chunks in. I’m not entirely sure what these chunks are – if I eat jelly, I prefer it to be chunk-free – so I’m going to hope they’re more sugary than savoury.
You need to be counting the chunks in the jelly, because not only do you have to fit shapes onto your grids, but you have to make sure the chunks satisfy the maths-based aspect of Jelly Maths. You see, you might be given a goal of achieving a total of ‘8’ in the current level. There are two grids to place your shapes and a ‘+’ between them, which means you need to find a combination of shapes (and their associated chunks) that, in total, make 8. That might be 1+7, 2+6, 3+5 and so on.
And that’s just two grids and a simple ‘+’ process. In Jelly Math, you can be given a + – x or ÷ , and it’s entirely possible to have three grids to fill in. The process can also be manually swapped about, so you can pick whether a + or x is best to achieve a particularly high goal. Since we’re all fully aware of the joys of BIDMAS (gosh, that takes me back), there are also brackets available to show you which process is being prioritised in the sum.
Mentally Changing Every Instance of ‘Math’ to ‘Maths’
I know that ‘Math’ was in the title, but I wasn’t fully prepared for the mental arithmetic involved in Jelly Math. While the game does have your back by showing you the current chunk totals in each grid, you do need to anticipate these totals before you slot the shapes/chunk in. There’s no use in just adding the shapes willy-nilly. Outside of the opening levels, you’re going to have to think carefully before you make any move in Jelly Math.
Personally, I’m a fan of how unforgiving Jelly Math is. You might think that having control over the math symbol means that you have dozens of ways of achieving each level’s total. If you need a 6, and you can use a + – x or ÷, there’s quite a few ways of getting there. But a) the totals are only that low in the opening levels, and b) you’d be surprised by how many ways Jelly Math can make things difficult for you.
Sometimes, symbols are locked in place. The goal totals can be high: not quite Countdown high, but pretty high nonetheless. The chunks in the jelly can be frustratingly unhelpful (it’s possible to have multiple jellies, all with the same number of chunks inside), and the shapes can be annoyingly mismatched to the grids. Jelly Math has a cracking habit of making the 1 and 2 chunk-shapes HUGE, so you can’t adjust your arithmetic by 1 or 2 without blowing a hole in your grid.
I kept transferring things over to paper. Right, I have a 1, 2, 5, 5, 5 and 6: how can I make 24? I’ll be jostling these numbers about, dividing and multiplying, only to return to the game to find that the sodding blocks won’t fit. So, it’s back to the drawing board, coming up with a new sum that doesn’t use the 1 or 2 because they’re always flipping huge. And this is the pattern for virtually every sum.
A Helping Hand on your Shoulder
Nattily, there’s a Hint and Retry system if things are getting a bit much. It should be noted that the Hint system will only show you one of potentially many solutions, so it won’t help you towards a correct sum with the blocks you already have placed. But as long as you can calibrate to this potential confusion, you’re golden. Even better, the Hint is on a very swift cooldown, so you could just let it solve the maths problem for you, if you are so inclined.
The biggest criticism I have is that the chunks are a little unhelpful. I’m not sure they had to be quite so small, and I would have liked them in a nice dice orientation, rather than blunderbussed around the jelly. I got a little tired of counting and recounting them, as I forgot which jelly had which number of chunks. Ideally, there would have been an annotation system, so I could scribble the numbers on. I appreciate why that’s not the case.
And we often say that ‘X game isn’t for everyone’, but – my gosh – Jelly Math is NOT for everyone. Let’s get our pencil and compass out and start making a Venn diagram. You need to be interested in budget puzzle games, and even then it’s budget puzzle games that beat you up and play dirty. You have to be okay with base arithmetic in your video games, and you need to be fine with basic, slightly ugly production values.
Brain Training for Block Fans
But you know what? If you’re still within the rings of Jelly Math’s Venn diagram, then it does a pretty good job. While it’s difficult, it’s helpful – totting up values for you, and providing hints if you need them. The puzzles are fiendish but achievable: you just need to fumble through trial and error, or discern a hint when it gives you them.
I had a fairly good time unlocking my 2000G in Jelly Math. It was more of a mental workout than I was expecting, but once I’d blown the cobwebs off the left-side of my brain, I was on board. It took me back to the educational games that I played at school, way back in the day (Smile and Granny’s Garden Hive rise up!), and the flashback was more pleasant than unpleasant.
Important Links
Buy from the Xbox Store, optimised for Series X|S – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/jelly-math-xbox-series/9P2J29Z2KM6W/0010
Buy an Xbox One version – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/jelly-math-xbox-one/9PJ136388Z7V/0010
Or an edition for Windows PC – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/jelly-math-windows/9NX3ZLMX9L6S/0010
