Jungo Full Playthrough (v1.0)

!!!UPDATE!!! I didn't know this until after I made this and posted, but there are multiple versions of this game. The version I played had Alawar as the publisher, and as far as I know is version 1.0. It was soon updated to a newer version, and that one is SIGNIFICANTLY easier than the one shown here. The amount of pushback shapes give you is doubled on basically every level, and you get a bit more time before the shadow starts creeping in. Difficultly is 50% easier at the least. All the tips below still apply, though. One more note, too: You can't unlock the 40 paws bonus on seemingly any version. The last paw, located in the Bonus 3 stage, won't save. No idea why. ------------- Wildfire Studios didn't only make Tumblebugs! In between the two Tumblebugs games they made Jungo, a grouping game that's honestly quite slick, looks and gameplay both. But it's also brutally hard. It takes really, really fast reaction times to successfully beat this game. I make it look easy, especially in the early levels where it almost seems like I'm cheating, but later levels get to the point where even I am barely making it out a lot of the time. One mistake or slowdown can leave you helpless. When I was first playing it, seeing how possible completing this looked, it was honestly not looking good, I was dying everywhere in the late game, but as I got better at scanning the field and knowing what to do the deaths became less and less until I was confident enough to try a full run. And this is a really good run, I was expecting a lot worse. I got pretty lucky that the game helped me out a bit with powerups and extra points. Only six deaths is really really good. The hardest level here is definitely 31-3 by a decent bit. That middle sweeper is unfairly fast, and the level layout makes big groups pretty much impossible. Then for second place is 34-2. The locks make the board hard to deal with, sweeper is fast, and sometimes you'll just have no good moves and you gotta take the death. Right behind that, 2A and 2B really, is 32-3, that level's design is a massive pain and despite a good start and a lucky rainstorm I still needed a lucky point grab just to not die. There's 3 big things you need to think about to not die here: Special Shapes Largest Group Bonus Powerup Management Special shapes are the only reason that this game is even close to beatable, they do basically all the work in pushing the sweeper back. The Zig-Zags, Squares, and Corners are the shapes you'll be making all the fucking time. You need to be able to scan the board and find the moves that make these shapes. It's very easy to make the wrong move, and make a group bigger than 4 that you can't form into a special. I played a lot of the harder levels (dying a bunch naturally) and watched back the recording for mistakes, that helped a lot, and eventually it'll become subconscious which moves not to make. Practice, practice, practice. Largest Group bonus is a very big help that you really need to think about, levels get so much shorter when you take advantage of it. Every time you make a new larger group the bonus you get increases like so: 50, 100, 175, 275, 400, 550, 725, etc etc. It gets big pretty fast. Just the first 5 is a thousand points, getting seven or eight of them is a massive massive boon. Start on this at the very beginning when the sweeper isn't charged up. For a good example, watch it from 1:33:57. 9 bonuses in that level was the only reason I beat expert time. There are situations, though, when the start of the level gives you such a good board that you just have to go for the massive match at the start for 1000+ points so don't completely discard that just for the bonus. The final trick is powerup management. The best powerups here, by far, are the Lightnings, because horizontal and vertical lines crossing the whole board give you great bonuses. Take advantage of those in every way possible, even without powerups it's worth looking at 5 or 6-long rows and columns for a line opportunity, because the game likes to give you those. Whirlwind also has a trick: it creates a 3x3 square when it activates, and guess what, that's a special shape. If you notice that it activating won't make it touch another ball, just do it. And those two powerups (along with the earthquake) have a half-second wait period before they activate. You'll see me exploit that everywhere to get extra points and zig shapes before they actually affect the orbs. It's a lot to think about, but you'll get a feel for it over time and the sadistic difficulty will slowly fall away a bit. But it's still hard. What might be even harder is finding all the paws hidden in the backgrounds, Jesus Christ, they really hid a lot of these, and as of now I still haven't found most of them. A video will be out hopefully soon with the locations of them all and the bonus content. The African tribal theme is a breath of fresh air compared to a lot of modern puzzle games for sure…