Imagine yourself as a perfectly content robot, surrounded by a bunch of baby robots that frolic and play. One day, you fall into a nap. During your unconsciousness, the babies are kidnapped for no real reason. Now they're trapped in foreign lands, alone and scared, tied to the ground by collars. You must rescue them.
Such is the story of Jed. Using thick pixel graphics and synthesized music, it's emulative of old-school platformers. There's an interesting twist to game-play, though: special tiles cause Jed's perspective of the world to flip—the background becomes the foreground, and the foreground becomes the background. Whichever is currently the background can still be seen behind the foreground in a darkened state.
Although by no means a long game, several levels test the player's skill and determination to save your baby buddies while avoiding a plethora of obstacles. Some stages contain rockets, which allow Jed to fly over the terrain, and three-shot guns that lock enemies in place for several seconds.
As a Freeware Game, it can be downloaded here
. It is currently playable on Windows and Linux systems.
Tropes used in Jed:
- 100% Completion: Collecting all fifty robots unlocks a necktie accessory for Jed.
- Always Check Behind the Chair: Several robots are hidden past where the world seems to end, usually seperated by a concealed passage or a low roof that can be walked on. Some of these are hinted at by inexplicable empty blocks inside the wall.
- And Your Reward Is Clothes: In this case a top hat, a beard, and a necktie.
- Boss Battle: The giant crawler and piranha robots, with the former appearing in Stage 5 and Challenge, and the latter being exclusive to Stage 10. Your main goals are the same as with their smaller versions: don't get hit and reach the door.
- Brutal Bonus Level: Challenge is aptly-named, being unlocked after beating the ten regular levels and requiring mastery of the skills taught in those levels.
- Collision Damage: The only way enemies can actually damage Jed is through contact. The hitboxes are somehow both generous and strict at the same time.
- Convection Shmonvection: Challenge takes place around some sort of lava flow.
- Cosmetic Award: The hat, beard, and tie unlocked by completing certain criteria do absolutely nothing during gameplay.
- Cute Machines: The babies are freaking adorable.
- Escort Mission: What the game boils down to, although you can go right past the babies in favor of reaching the exit.
- Excuse Plot: Rescue baby robots! Really, even the game's description above is taking liberties.
- Floating Platforms: Which ones are actually floating can be difficult to decipher at times, due to the game's world-flipping nature.
- For the Evulz: The enemy robots' motivation for everything evil they do, according to the author.
- Friendly Fireproof: The few times you get the enemy-freezing gun, the babies are immune to its shots.
- Gotta Catch Them All: Of the semi-important type.
- Hailfire Peaks: Challenge graduates from Lethal Lava Land to this once the icy platforms begin showing up.
- Jet Pack: Some levels have these as temporary power-ups for Jed so he can get to platforms his regular jump can't reach.
- Jump Physics: Somewhat like that of Cave Story, in that the Jed glides more than drops.
- Layered World: Each level has a foreground layer and a background layer, which swap upon touching swirly tiles.
- Lethal Lava Land: In the bonus level Challenge, the floor is lava. Jed must cross precarious platforms the whole way to the exit.
- Mecha-Mooks: The standard piranha and walker robots.
- Mechanical Lifeforms: The author confirming that robots procreate like humans points towards this being the case.
- Mechanical Monster: The upscaled piranha and walker robots.
- Mercy Invincibility: Extends past normal Collision Damage to water and lava.
- Non-Lethal Bottomless Pits: Falling into the water or lava at the bottom of the screen is no more hazardous than the enemy robots. As long as Jed has at least one baby robot with him, he'll be teleported back to the last solid ground he was on.
- One-Hit-Point Wonder: Until you've rescued at least one robot, Jed will die from a single hit.
- Palette Swap: Of the “same color, get bigger” variety.
- Papa Wolf: Jed. Even if he doesn't actively harm the robots that kidnapped his babies, he walks circles around them while leading the toddlers back to safety.
- Piranha Problem: One of two enemy varieties in the game are robotic piranhas that leap out of water at regular intervals.
- Power-Up: The Jet Pack and pellet gun.
- Retraux: The game is in a chunky, pixelated style reminiscent of 1980s video games.
- Selective Gravity: A select few objects delight in punching the law of gravity square in the face.
- Slave Collar: Used to keep the baby robots in place.
- Slippy-Slidey Ice World: Patches of snow drastically change the movement system — Jed skates rather than walks, and there's massive inertia toward changing direction, even in jumps.
- Super Drowning Skills: Jed can't swim at all. If he touches water, he gets teleported back to solid ground, or dies outright if he has no baby robots with him.
- Time Trial: Getting your collective time across the ten main levels to under seven minutes unlocks the beard.
- Trial-and-Error Gameplay: Challenge kicks this into high-gear.
- Video Game Cruelty Potential: Getting fast times on each level means not taking the time to collect robots — or sacrificing them for Mercy Invincibility to power through time-consuming obstacles.
- Wave of Babies: There's a total of 50 baby robots to rescue throughout the game. They all swarm around Jed like this in the final storybook picture.
