Jill of the Jungle: an entire trilogy and three ways to turn into an animal

Between the 2018 accounts, which treat the game as a childhood gift, and the 2025 one, which sees nothing but a tired Mario, the difference was never the game — it was who got there first.

A knife, a spinning blade and three animal disguises

Jill faces the hardest fight of her life in a jungle where her hand weapon is a knife and a spinning blade. The real trick against the enemies, though, lies in the magic icons scattered along the way: they turn the heroine into a flaming bird, a hopping frog or, better yet, a fish that can shoot. This edition gathers the three original chapters — Jill of the Jungle, Jill Goes Underground and Jill Saves the Prince — into a single package, for anyone who wants to cross the whole jungle in one go.

This is arcade-style action and platforming: you pick a stage from a larger map and make your way from one point to the next, taking on whatever turns up. Epic Games handled the production and distribution of this collected version, released on November 2, 2018. There is no trailer to watch; anyone wanting a first visual impression has to rely on the screenshots the store posted.

Those who never had Mario had Jill

The oldest reviews all appeared on the very day of the re-release, November 2, 2018, and replay a similar scene: someone opens their wallet ready to pay for the game and finds, at the checkout, that it already costs nothing — a surprise one player likens to getting a present out of season. Another says he grew up with no Mario, no Sonic and no Samus at home, but he had Jill, and he credits the colorful graphics and the sound of the era for the fondness he still carries today. A third recalls the pleasure of turning into the flaming bird just to explore the map more thoroughly.

Not everything in those same reviews is praise without reservation. One player writes in July 2019 that the heroine could be a distant relative of the Resident Evil investigator and, once the joke has landed, admits that jumping and landing freeze her for a moment, and that while crouching she can't throw the knife at the shorter enemies. Another, in December 2021, praises the old-school gameplay and still concedes that the jump is odd and stiffens up near the vines, and that some stretches of the trilogy's second part are more annoying than they should be.

A lone review, arriving much later

Arriving much later, in July 2025, one review breaks from the chorus. For this player, the two-dimensional platformer only imitates and mocks the Mario mold without adding anything of its own: the graphics, physics, animation and soundtrack all feel too dated to convince, and the only way to remap the keys is to open the emulator bundled with the game. The controls, he writes, are uncomfortable and tiring, and the game's text exists only in English.

The plot bothers him too: to him it blends jungle elements with industrial parts into a story he finds utterly incoherent, and the difficulty falls into the opposite trap from the usual complaint about hard games — the enemies pace back and forth along fixed routes, like predictable robots. Even so, one concession remains: the interface works well, and saving and loading your progress across up to 5 different slots is no trouble at all.

For anyone willing to forgive the sticky jump

The trilogy pays off most for those who already carry some memory of the jungle before they open the game — a familiar name, a cover they recognize, a friend who lent them the floppy disk decades ago. It is that memory that forgives the sticky jump, the untranslated English and the lack of configuration options. Without that emotional anchor, what's left is a dated Mario imitation, with stiff physics and too little staying power to hold anyone who arrives with no familiarity with the material at all.

The measure here isn't difficulty or graphics: it's whether the jungle already meant something before the first jump.