The first thing I need you to know about Jingoku is that I’m bad at Jingoku. The second thing is that I’m still going to be playing a lot of Jenga and the accompanying minigames, because it’s that impressive. And because it has a leaderboard, which will help me prove when I’m improving. Eventually. Hopefully.
Jingoku was developed in only 72 hours by indie developer Buried Things for the Ludum Dare 49 game jam, resulting in a bunch of surprisingly polished minigames. In it, you’re playing a solo game of virtual Jenga. For each brick you remove, you’ll have a few seconds to complete a WarioWare-style minigame. Your goal is to win as many minigames as possible before your Jenga tower topples. It’s a goal I’ve been reattempting a lot.
All of Jingoku’s minigames are played with mouse controls, and they offer a good amount of variety—you’ll be firing foam darts at targets, playing tug of war and digging through the menus of fake software. Not only are the minigames fun to play, Buried Things somehow found time in those 72 hours to include in-game achievements, as well as stats and a global leaderboard ranking, all wrapped up in a stylish presentation. The difficulty level swings pretty wildly from game to game, however, and I feel a sense of dread whenever I pull a brick for the symbol-matching or spam text minigames.
Jingoku is available for free in a browser and for download on Itch.io, or at its Ludum Dare 49 entry page where you can even watch the livestream of its complete development process. And you can also check out any of the nearly 3,000 other games developed for the game jam, which I intend to do once I’ve mastered placing this hat.