Your ninja is stuck to a wall, and sliding down it. That is the situation at every moment of this game. Height is not something you hold, it is something you are constantly losing, and the only way to gain any is to let go of the thing keeping you up. Tap and the ninja kicks off, crosses the shaft, and sticks the far side ten metres higher — from wherever it happened to be when you tapped, not from where you wish it had been.

There is only ever one wall to jump to, so the game never asks you where. It only ever asks when, and it has arranged things so that waiting for a better landing makes the landing worse. That is the whole design, and it is a good one.

Where it comes from

Two ancestries meet here. The wall kick is a platformer move — clinging to a vertical surface and pushing off it goes back to the late-eighties ninja games and was made properly expressive when three-dimensional platformers picked it up in the mid-nineties. The endless vertical climb is a much later, much more casual idea: a single tall column, no finish, a number that only goes up, and a leaderboard consisting of yesterday's you.

Put together they make something neither is on its own. A wall kick in a platformer is a way of getting past an obstacle. Here it is the only verb you have, so every ounce of expression has to come out of its timing.

What this version does with it

Two rules do the work. Clinging costs height — a bit under three metres a second, steadily — so hesitation has a running price and is never the safe option. And a kick always gains the same ten metres, measured from wherever you left. The two together are the game. Hesitate in order to pick a clean landing and you have spent the very altitude that made it clean; by the time you commit, the place you were aiming for has come down to meet you.

On top of that sits a second kick. A single tap while airborne re-aims and buys roughly three and a half metres more, and you get one of them per jump; the next arrives when you have hold of a wall again. Treat it as a correction, not a bonus. Firing it every time out of reflex is how promising climbs finish early. The walls get meaner with altitude. Some hazards are bolted down and are purely a matter of reading the far side before you go; others swing out into the middle on arms and put the crossing itself at risk; and a few refuse to hold still, which means a perfectly good perch can have become lethal during the second and a bit you spent crossing to it. The shaft narrows as you climb, and the camera never comes back down — by nine hundred metres everything is happening about three times as fast as it was at the start.

Thirty seconds to start

• Tap anywhere to kick off. Space, the arrow keys and Enter all do the same thing.
• Tap again while airborne for the one mid-air kick.
• Landing on anything sharp ends the climb. P pauses.

The instinct to fight

Everything about this game rewards leaving earlier than feels comfortable, and every instinct you have says wait. Watch the far wall rather than your own ninja — the wall is where the decision actually lives — learn the beat of the moving hazards instead of hoping past them, and keep the second kick for a reason you can name. The guide has the rest, including how jumps queue near the top of a climb.

Read the full Ninja Jump guide  →

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