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You can tell pretty much everything you need to know about a game from its jump mechanics, whether it's contemporary Grand Theft Auto's slapstick tumble, the perfect bound in a Mario game or the cotton-soft float of Sackboy. The jump in Scram Kitty, a former Wii U exclusive that's now on its way to PS4 and Vita, was always a bit harder to read: a strange arc subject to the momentum you'd built up riding rails, and subject to the gravity of levels that would loop across the screen. In that jump you'll see some of the impeccable taste of Scram Kitty's developer, Rhodri Broadbent, who worked at Lionhead and Q-Games before setting up Dakko Dakko. There's some of the inventiveness of Treasure, and the engineering precision of Nintendo. Its elasticity is initially unwieldy, which made it something of an acquired taste.
"It was made for people who like a challenge," Broadbent says over Skype as he prepares this week's release of Scram Kitty DX. "The thing is, we wanted to create a game that people who really wanted to master it could, and feel like they've achieved something, and that's exactly what we did and all the feedback suggests that. We didn't really take into consideration that a lot of people want to progress through a game without really mastering challenges, and that's fine - it's a different kind of game, and it meant some of the response was like 'whoa, this is a really hard game'. And fair enough, time is important to people and they don't want to spend it learning a crazy gravity system that's never been done before.
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