Above, a scene from “Jelly Reef.” (Photo credit: Game Oven)

By Todd Martens
Los Angeles Times

“Jelly Reef” looks adorable. At the start, players will have a school of jellyfish — all of them wide-eyed and smiling. Then, in a matter of moments, they will all be dead.

This wouldn’t be so harrowing if they didn’t start to frown first, a simple touch that turns this accessible mobile game into one of pure dread. Ultimately, it’s as much about nurturing tiny gelatinous reddish and orangish critters as it is about reaching a goal.

“Jelly Reef” is also the swan song from the three-person Netherlands-based studio Game Oven, a company that in its brief existence specialized in pushing the boundaries of the mobile experience. A previous game, “Bounden,” sought to teach two players how to dance as they were connected via one phone. Following on-screen prompts, participants would twirl around each other with a high potential for awkward body-bumps.

“Jelly Reef” isn’t nearly as experimental. It’s Game Oven’s most approachable game, and the first that isn’t centered on making players uncomfortable, as long as they’re OK with watching tiny sea creatures die.

“It’s sort of tricking people, I guess,” studio co-founder Eline Muijres said at the South by Southwest games festival in Austin, Texas, in March.

“It has these really cute and relaxing visuals. But there are enemies in this game, and you need to be very precise. It’s a contrast. In the end, people like that. They have to be careful.”

Careful is an understatement. The game, coming in a matter of weeks for iOS and Android devices (a version for Windows phones is available now), asks players to manipulate water currents to guide the jellyfish to safety. Its levels are randomly generated, so no two plays are the same, and changing the course of water is at times an unpredictable little predicament.

Swipe too fast and the jellyfish will encounter a prickly piece of coral. Swipe too slowly and a shark or blowfish will gobble the jellyfish right up.

As enemies come into view, the jellyfish — represented here as oval faces with giant eyes and tentacles — will tense up and look fearful. The temptation to not start swiping the phone wildly is a difficult one.

The jellyfish will often see perils before the player does, so keeping a close eye on their eyes is essential.

“At first, they didn’t have big eyes,” Muijres said. “We want you to be able to see when they’re scared. When they’re together, they’re happy, but when they’re apart, they’re not so happy. When they’re near an urchin or near another type of enemy, they’re scared. That helps the player. It says, ‘You don’t want to touch that.’ That’s why we made the eyes a little bigger. Even on a small screen, you can see that fear.”

“Jelly Reef” gets difficult fast, this despite its colorful coral reef universe.

Thankfully, there are plenty of tiny jellyfish eggs lying around to replenish one’s supply of cutesy marine animals. It adds an aspect to the game that feels like parenting.

“In a way, but you still kill your babies,” Muijres said. “You basically try to save as many jellyfish as you can and pick up the eggs. We want people to go look for eggs. If you run out of jellyfish, you’re dead, and you need to start over. We want to punish you for not keeping them alive.”

Though “Jelly Reef” will be Game Oven’s final game, it was actually the first the studio began developing. The game started as a student project, initially available for large, touch screen-enabled Microsoft tables. It was first a multiplayer game, and developers Adriaan de Jongh and Bojan Endrovski became fascinated with how people played it rather than the actual game itself.

Namely, they were interested in what happened when a game inspired people to touch each other accidentally. Game Oven’s games — “Fingle” and “Friendstrap,” among them — were focused on using the digital space to get people to interact in real life.

“People would touch each other and that would inspire all sorts of reactions,” Muijres said. “That reaction is very interesting. People would accidentally touch each other’s hands and then be all awkward about it.”

That inspired the team to make the mobile game “Fingle,” a sort of “Twister” for fingers.

Or, as Muijres put it, “a game that was all about weird, awkward touching.”

Game Oven, however, is breaking up because of creative differences.

“We could have made other games,” Muijres said. “We’re not bankrupt.”

De Jongh intends to focus on more experimental, art-driven games, while Endrovski hasn’t revealed his next move.

Muijres is working full time on “Interloper,” a strategy game designed to be played in five minutes. (People don’t have a lot of time, Muijres said.)

“Interloper” looks abstract — its art is somewhere between deep space and the deep ocean — but Muijres wants it to have broad appeal. That’s why it’s short and why it’s about territory management rather than killing.

“There are lots of different types of gamers,” she said. “I really like to get people to play games who don’t necessarily identify as gamers. That’s what I really liked about showing ‘Bounden.’ It’s so out of their idea of what a game really is, and that’s like magic to me.”

‘JELLY REEF’
Developer: Game Oven
Platforms: iOS, Windows Phone, Android
Price: $1.99 for iOS, free for Windows mobile and $2.17 on Android