I’ve never been so proud to award a game 2 stars / C rank. It looks like garbage, the credits are a minute long, and it is un-ironically some of the most fun I’ve had playing a game this year.
Let me be clear, this is not a blanket endorsement. You should probably not play this. The value I found in this game only elevates it to the level of playable mediocrity. But the context! It’s an Ice Age™ spin-off 3D-platformer on a shoe-string budget! Its mere existence is a travesty, a waste of plastic destined for the discounted (but never discounted enough) back shelf of a rural Walmart gaming section, next to a half-opened Mario amiibo and a Frozen II-branded loofah. It is so absurd that I joked for years if it ever dropped to $5, I would play it for the meme, and what do you know, Sony dropped it as part of their shitty Netflix subscription.
But no joke, Scrat’s Nutty Adventure has my favorite double-jump I’ve encountered in all of 3D gaming.
I’ve been learning recently that I don’t hate nuts, but that my mom made god-awful walnut brownies when I was a kid. Just raw, uncooked giant walnut chunks on top of otherwise normal-ass brownies with some decent frosting. My multi-decade belief that I hated nuts, (all nuts, because my mom threw raw, whole almonds and hazelnuts on all sorts of things they had no business being on), was squarely my mom’s fault for jamming a flavor she liked onto other flavors she liked without understanding how they worked together. It was not the walnuts’ fault, but they took the blame, because they were tangible. They stood out as The Thing I Did Not Like about my Brownie Experience.
But nuts are fine if they are prepared in a recipe that understands how to use their attributes correctly.
This is basically how I feel about double jumps. I have long hated them. There are some games, where as soon as I feel the character jump for the first time, I think, “oh, I’m gonna get a double jump later.” Sometimes it's because the level design gives it away. Sometimes it's because the regular jump feels like an incomplete action. If half the game will be designed for me to need to do the double jump, that will condition my muscle memory to always double jump even when I need a regular jump. And if that’s the case for me, that goes triple for the developers and testers making the game. Why bother fine-tuning the feel of the regular jump if, after a certain point, I’ll only do so on accident? The existence of the double jump renders the regular jump ungraded developer homework.
And frustratingly, that double jump muscle memory will make me worse at the game! I remember as a kid the first time I encountered this in Super Mario Sunshine with that god-awful Hover Nozzle. That was the first time I became aware of how a game’s basic mechanics incentivized me to goblinize movement to absurdity. I was so scared of falling off the edge that I always activated the Hover Nozzle. Even when I could see mid-jump that I would have made the gap with a regular jump. That activating the Hover Nozzle actually made clearing the gap take more time than if I’d done a regular jump. Because activating the Hover Nozzle at the wrong time would either keep or lose momentum from the regular jump, which then required course correction as I tried to hover back to where I would have landed if I hadn’t pressed the Hover Nozzle button in the first place.
Adding to this, Mario could grab onto ledges. So I didn’t need to clear a jump, I could just get close-enough to making a jump. Which meant I didn’t gain precise knowledge of jumping trajectory and timing, but an awareness of the fuzzy “Mario will probably cling onto the ledge and / or land on the ledge” zone.
I saw myself do this. I felt like an idiot watching myself do this. And when the game took away the ability to hover for certain missions, now I sucked! I had no idea where the distance of my jump would take me! My sense of timing, of how long I could hang in the air, it was all wrong! Beating those challenges didn’t make me feel better, it created this weird longing for the Hover Nozzle back, that I felt naked without it - even though I also knew the Hover Nozzle was why I sucked at these Hover Nozzle-less challenges in the first place!
That’s the most extreme example, but the behavior exists in spirit even in games I think have put a lot of effort into their movement systems and level design. Hollow Knight had a solid enough standard jump I didn’t suspect I’d get a double jump until the level geometry told me I would. That double jump was hidden far enough into the game I got pretty adept at regular jumping! But the instant I got that double jump, my idiot brain mashed it like a crutch and promptly forgot all the innate timing I’d mastered for the previously satisfying regular jump.
Because Hollow Knight made the mistake of making the double jump too “fun.” The feeling of flight from pressing the double jump button was immediate, dynamic, weighty, satisfying enough that the temptation to press it smothered other impulses to try controlling my landing position more intelligently. Although coming from the other direction, Hollow Knight still had the same result of me needlessly double jumping all over the place, missing ledges and feeling like an idiot. Hollow Knight’s crushing combat difficulty beat some of that instinct out of me when it mattered, but the implementation of the double jump made the process more tedious than it needed to be.
And with all that preamble, I can now extol the virtues of Scrat. Because in Scrat’s Nutty Adventure, this automatic double jump mania never happened. I always knew when to jump, double jump, or try for a “secret” third jump by tail spin attacking mid-air. Each felt like an equally important, discrete action that I could independently determine the merit of using or not using.
Jumping as Scrat is not immediately “fun” the way that it is in Hollow Knight. Each jump type has start-up lag and end-lag animations that stop the process of jumping from becoming an automatic impulse. If you’re trying to rush through a level with as much speed as possible, you want to jump only the minimum required amount. (And since the levels in Ice Age are ugly as sin, I definitely had that mindset.)
Jumping as Scrat is mostly for covering horizontal distances. The height gained from double-jumping is negligible. Although it is necessary for getting on to some ledges, level geometry typically only requires you to think about the extra distance or the extra height you would gain, but not both at the same time. A gap that would require the double jump to cross will often be at the same starting and ending elevation, while a ledge requiring vertical height will often be in a tight corridor without any gaps to fall down.
Thinking about how clear each intended jump sequence was in Scrat’s Nutty Adventure made me realize how double jumping is often used as a crutch in other games. If you gain enough height from a double jump, and you can control the direction of your fall, then cautious players are rewarded from early double jumps by changing the action from “jumping” to “controlled falling”, which requires less predictive power and less spatial awareness of your character’s capabilities. Scrat, however, barely goes up one body length during the course of a jump, so controlled falling is not really an option. Additionally, his jump animations for the double-jump and tail spin extension are so chaotic that controlled falling is much less reliable. You must properly gauge distance and timing before pressing the jump button, not during or after.
Because Scrat’s jumps are fairly rigid, the geometry is more forgiving. Landing spaces are wide and easily visible. I noticed that the depth of field for the camera is fairly close to Scrat’s body, which helps sell the feeling that he is a small creature in a larger world. An effect of this, compared to Mario games that let the camera zoom out to show off large and beautiful landscapes, is that gauging jump distances actually gets easier. The perspective change of platforms getting closer or farther from the camera’s vanishing point is instinctual, which creates an innate understanding regardless of what the environment looks like. If you can clearly make out the other side of the gap, regular jump. If the other side of the gap looks a little daunting, double jump. If the ledge is so far away that you don’t think you can even get over there, but there are no other platforms in between, then you need to double jump with tail spin extension. But the double jump tail spin extension is only needed for accessing optional collectibles, so your sense of jump or double jump will be nicely honed for finishing the main routes of the campaigns.
It did take me some time with the game to understand its flow and appreciate these elements of its design, because, again, so much of this game is complete ass. Scrat has a health bar and … purple gem meter (?) that are some of the most shovel-ware core of graphics. There is combat, and it is so unsatisfying. Even common beetle enemies take way too many hits to die, with no health bars or any indication as to how close to death they are. Scrat has zero transition frames between his attack animations in his standard combo, and sound design is wildly inconsistent and mushy.
But despite some audio glitches, a couple end-of-world sequences that had me fall through the floor, and some truly terrible font choice and text placement, this game has actual design work in it.
Scrat’s Nutty Adventure makes me think of the Oscars. Who wins best actor? It’s not whoever did the best acting in all of the movies made that year - its whoever did the best acting in a well produced movie with a good script and a good director and a solid cast that didn’t hold the actor back. Its a performance that is tangible, even if it is the result of multiple people doing their job well. Think instead of a performance that appears only mediocre on screen, but had a terrible script, a dead-weight cast, and a wrong-headed director. Summoning that level of mediocrity in such circumstances certainly speaks to a level of acting worthy of consideration.
In that spirit, the level design of Scrat’s Nutty Adventure deserves an award. I have said that the visuals are not appealing more than once, but once I got over the color-less palette, I noticed real care had gone into making every level feel like a place. That level paths through mountains and cliffs wound in such a way where every set of platforming jumps could theoretically be stumbled upon in nature. Ever since the Mario games have gone full abstract nonsense in their platforming environments, it was a nice thing to notice.
Because how much cheaper and easier would it have been to copy paste a few floating platforms and have an Ice Age themed background you couldn’t interact with? Instead of committing to the lived experience of being a small Scrat in an indifferent world?
I got curious and went back to look at some Scrat clips on YouTube, and you know, his janky attack animations are true to the source material! It was a visual joke that he did kung-fu at a lower frame rate than the rest of the movie, because the rest of the Ice Age world was committed to being more grounded. What I’d initially laughed off as cheap game production was actually trying to dig into the essence of the Scrat character!
At the same time, the developers knew no one gave a flying fuck about this project, or Scrat, and I love the decisions they made to go nuts. Magic floating slingshots? Who cares! Telekinesis as an unlockable power-up? Sure, go for it! Not having to get right up to blocks to move blocks for moving-block-puzzles is very kind of you, actually!
There is a player-focused consideration that can be felt as one acclimates to the complete lack of polish. There’s no life system, and although Scrat has a health bar, it is unaffected by missing jumps. I think that takes the pressure off of jumping enough to let one focus on learning how the jumps work. (Hey, maybe the lives system in Super Mario Sunshine was why I was so cautious all the time!) Because although Scrat can’t hold on to ledges, forcing you to clear jumps instead of getting close enough, missing a jump merely brings you back to try again.
Where Scrat’s Nutty Adventure feels like a real conversation with the player is if you endeavor to look for all the pointless collectibles. Some of their hiding places are downright devious. Not since the first Ratchet & Clank have I felt a developer so eager to reward a player for thinking “that looks out of bounds, I’mma try to get over there.” But also, half the time that really is out of bounds and you’ll fall through some level geometry. Which is pretty funny in its own right!
Again, I do not think anyone will find Scrat’s Nutty Adventure as profound as I did. But it was so different from my expectations that it broke me out of a multi-month funk of not enjoying games very much. (I’m still working on the essay for how much that other game broke my spirit, actually!) I’m so happy this years-long personal meme in the making gave me something to latch onto, and also happy I was able to Platinum it in a single day. And of course I used a collectibles guide, because fuck if it deserved more of my time than that.
I will close this out by typing out here, in its entirety, the 18 (!) credited people who made this game. The production company, or even their special thanks section, contained almost as many people! I commend their hard work, for actually trying and giving a fuck, on a project that probably no one but me will ever respect. God’s speed, you glorious bastards.
CEO
Stewart Gilray
CTO
Steven Caslin
Producer
David Schumacher
Design Lead
Rick Payne
Designers
Cameron Chalmers
Dave Price
Programming Lead
Ben Price
Programmers
Joseph Barber
Darren Foster
Art Lead
Mike Engstrom
Artists
Dominic Littler
Charlotte (Eva) Watson
Hajinalka Szanto
Aaron Humphreys
Animation Lead
Billy Allison
Animation
Ed Swain
Quality Assurance
Kieran Forrester
Audio
Allister Brimble
Let me be clear, this is not a blanket endorsement. You should probably not play this. The value I found in this game only elevates it to the level of playable mediocrity. But the context! It’s an Ice Age™ spin-off 3D-platformer on a shoe-string budget! Its mere existence is a travesty, a waste of plastic destined for the discounted (but never discounted enough) back shelf of a rural Walmart gaming section, next to a half-opened Mario amiibo and a Frozen II-branded loofah. It is so absurd that I joked for years if it ever dropped to $5, I would play it for the meme, and what do you know, Sony dropped it as part of their shitty Netflix subscription.
But no joke, Scrat’s Nutty Adventure has my favorite double-jump I’ve encountered in all of 3D gaming.
I’ve been learning recently that I don’t hate nuts, but that my mom made god-awful walnut brownies when I was a kid. Just raw, uncooked giant walnut chunks on top of otherwise normal-ass brownies with some decent frosting. My multi-decade belief that I hated nuts, (all nuts, because my mom threw raw, whole almonds and hazelnuts on all sorts of things they had no business being on), was squarely my mom’s fault for jamming a flavor she liked onto other flavors she liked without understanding how they worked together. It was not the walnuts’ fault, but they took the blame, because they were tangible. They stood out as The Thing I Did Not Like about my Brownie Experience.
But nuts are fine if they are prepared in a recipe that understands how to use their attributes correctly.
This is basically how I feel about double jumps. I have long hated them. There are some games, where as soon as I feel the character jump for the first time, I think, “oh, I’m gonna get a double jump later.” Sometimes it's because the level design gives it away. Sometimes it's because the regular jump feels like an incomplete action. If half the game will be designed for me to need to do the double jump, that will condition my muscle memory to always double jump even when I need a regular jump. And if that’s the case for me, that goes triple for the developers and testers making the game. Why bother fine-tuning the feel of the regular jump if, after a certain point, I’ll only do so on accident? The existence of the double jump renders the regular jump ungraded developer homework.
And frustratingly, that double jump muscle memory will make me worse at the game! I remember as a kid the first time I encountered this in Super Mario Sunshine with that god-awful Hover Nozzle. That was the first time I became aware of how a game’s basic mechanics incentivized me to goblinize movement to absurdity. I was so scared of falling off the edge that I always activated the Hover Nozzle. Even when I could see mid-jump that I would have made the gap with a regular jump. That activating the Hover Nozzle actually made clearing the gap take more time than if I’d done a regular jump. Because activating the Hover Nozzle at the wrong time would either keep or lose momentum from the regular jump, which then required course correction as I tried to hover back to where I would have landed if I hadn’t pressed the Hover Nozzle button in the first place.
Adding to this, Mario could grab onto ledges. So I didn’t need to clear a jump, I could just get close-enough to making a jump. Which meant I didn’t gain precise knowledge of jumping trajectory and timing, but an awareness of the fuzzy “Mario will probably cling onto the ledge and / or land on the ledge” zone.
I saw myself do this. I felt like an idiot watching myself do this. And when the game took away the ability to hover for certain missions, now I sucked! I had no idea where the distance of my jump would take me! My sense of timing, of how long I could hang in the air, it was all wrong! Beating those challenges didn’t make me feel better, it created this weird longing for the Hover Nozzle back, that I felt naked without it - even though I also knew the Hover Nozzle was why I sucked at these Hover Nozzle-less challenges in the first place!
That’s the most extreme example, but the behavior exists in spirit even in games I think have put a lot of effort into their movement systems and level design. Hollow Knight had a solid enough standard jump I didn’t suspect I’d get a double jump until the level geometry told me I would. That double jump was hidden far enough into the game I got pretty adept at regular jumping! But the instant I got that double jump, my idiot brain mashed it like a crutch and promptly forgot all the innate timing I’d mastered for the previously satisfying regular jump.
Because Hollow Knight made the mistake of making the double jump too “fun.” The feeling of flight from pressing the double jump button was immediate, dynamic, weighty, satisfying enough that the temptation to press it smothered other impulses to try controlling my landing position more intelligently. Although coming from the other direction, Hollow Knight still had the same result of me needlessly double jumping all over the place, missing ledges and feeling like an idiot. Hollow Knight’s crushing combat difficulty beat some of that instinct out of me when it mattered, but the implementation of the double jump made the process more tedious than it needed to be.
And with all that preamble, I can now extol the virtues of Scrat. Because in Scrat’s Nutty Adventure, this automatic double jump mania never happened. I always knew when to jump, double jump, or try for a “secret” third jump by tail spin attacking mid-air. Each felt like an equally important, discrete action that I could independently determine the merit of using or not using.
Jumping as Scrat is not immediately “fun” the way that it is in Hollow Knight. Each jump type has start-up lag and end-lag animations that stop the process of jumping from becoming an automatic impulse. If you’re trying to rush through a level with as much speed as possible, you want to jump only the minimum required amount. (And since the levels in Ice Age are ugly as sin, I definitely had that mindset.)
Jumping as Scrat is mostly for covering horizontal distances. The height gained from double-jumping is negligible. Although it is necessary for getting on to some ledges, level geometry typically only requires you to think about the extra distance or the extra height you would gain, but not both at the same time. A gap that would require the double jump to cross will often be at the same starting and ending elevation, while a ledge requiring vertical height will often be in a tight corridor without any gaps to fall down.
Thinking about how clear each intended jump sequence was in Scrat’s Nutty Adventure made me realize how double jumping is often used as a crutch in other games. If you gain enough height from a double jump, and you can control the direction of your fall, then cautious players are rewarded from early double jumps by changing the action from “jumping” to “controlled falling”, which requires less predictive power and less spatial awareness of your character’s capabilities. Scrat, however, barely goes up one body length during the course of a jump, so controlled falling is not really an option. Additionally, his jump animations for the double-jump and tail spin extension are so chaotic that controlled falling is much less reliable. You must properly gauge distance and timing before pressing the jump button, not during or after.
Because Scrat’s jumps are fairly rigid, the geometry is more forgiving. Landing spaces are wide and easily visible. I noticed that the depth of field for the camera is fairly close to Scrat’s body, which helps sell the feeling that he is a small creature in a larger world. An effect of this, compared to Mario games that let the camera zoom out to show off large and beautiful landscapes, is that gauging jump distances actually gets easier. The perspective change of platforms getting closer or farther from the camera’s vanishing point is instinctual, which creates an innate understanding regardless of what the environment looks like. If you can clearly make out the other side of the gap, regular jump. If the other side of the gap looks a little daunting, double jump. If the ledge is so far away that you don’t think you can even get over there, but there are no other platforms in between, then you need to double jump with tail spin extension. But the double jump tail spin extension is only needed for accessing optional collectibles, so your sense of jump or double jump will be nicely honed for finishing the main routes of the campaigns.
It did take me some time with the game to understand its flow and appreciate these elements of its design, because, again, so much of this game is complete ass. Scrat has a health bar and … purple gem meter (?) that are some of the most shovel-ware core of graphics. There is combat, and it is so unsatisfying. Even common beetle enemies take way too many hits to die, with no health bars or any indication as to how close to death they are. Scrat has zero transition frames between his attack animations in his standard combo, and sound design is wildly inconsistent and mushy.
But despite some audio glitches, a couple end-of-world sequences that had me fall through the floor, and some truly terrible font choice and text placement, this game has actual design work in it.
Scrat’s Nutty Adventure makes me think of the Oscars. Who wins best actor? It’s not whoever did the best acting in all of the movies made that year - its whoever did the best acting in a well produced movie with a good script and a good director and a solid cast that didn’t hold the actor back. Its a performance that is tangible, even if it is the result of multiple people doing their job well. Think instead of a performance that appears only mediocre on screen, but had a terrible script, a dead-weight cast, and a wrong-headed director. Summoning that level of mediocrity in such circumstances certainly speaks to a level of acting worthy of consideration.
In that spirit, the level design of Scrat’s Nutty Adventure deserves an award. I have said that the visuals are not appealing more than once, but once I got over the color-less palette, I noticed real care had gone into making every level feel like a place. That level paths through mountains and cliffs wound in such a way where every set of platforming jumps could theoretically be stumbled upon in nature. Ever since the Mario games have gone full abstract nonsense in their platforming environments, it was a nice thing to notice.
Because how much cheaper and easier would it have been to copy paste a few floating platforms and have an Ice Age themed background you couldn’t interact with? Instead of committing to the lived experience of being a small Scrat in an indifferent world?
I got curious and went back to look at some Scrat clips on YouTube, and you know, his janky attack animations are true to the source material! It was a visual joke that he did kung-fu at a lower frame rate than the rest of the movie, because the rest of the Ice Age world was committed to being more grounded. What I’d initially laughed off as cheap game production was actually trying to dig into the essence of the Scrat character!
At the same time, the developers knew no one gave a flying fuck about this project, or Scrat, and I love the decisions they made to go nuts. Magic floating slingshots? Who cares! Telekinesis as an unlockable power-up? Sure, go for it! Not having to get right up to blocks to move blocks for moving-block-puzzles is very kind of you, actually!
There is a player-focused consideration that can be felt as one acclimates to the complete lack of polish. There’s no life system, and although Scrat has a health bar, it is unaffected by missing jumps. I think that takes the pressure off of jumping enough to let one focus on learning how the jumps work. (Hey, maybe the lives system in Super Mario Sunshine was why I was so cautious all the time!) Because although Scrat can’t hold on to ledges, forcing you to clear jumps instead of getting close enough, missing a jump merely brings you back to try again.
Where Scrat’s Nutty Adventure feels like a real conversation with the player is if you endeavor to look for all the pointless collectibles. Some of their hiding places are downright devious. Not since the first Ratchet & Clank have I felt a developer so eager to reward a player for thinking “that looks out of bounds, I’mma try to get over there.” But also, half the time that really is out of bounds and you’ll fall through some level geometry. Which is pretty funny in its own right!
Again, I do not think anyone will find Scrat’s Nutty Adventure as profound as I did. But it was so different from my expectations that it broke me out of a multi-month funk of not enjoying games very much. (I’m still working on the essay for how much that other game broke my spirit, actually!) I’m so happy this years-long personal meme in the making gave me something to latch onto, and also happy I was able to Platinum it in a single day. And of course I used a collectibles guide, because fuck if it deserved more of my time than that.
I will close this out by typing out here, in its entirety, the 18 (!) credited people who made this game. The production company, or even their special thanks section, contained almost as many people! I commend their hard work, for actually trying and giving a fuck, on a project that probably no one but me will ever respect. God’s speed, you glorious bastards.
CEO
Stewart Gilray
CTO
Steven Caslin
Producer
David Schumacher
Design Lead
Rick Payne
Designers
Cameron Chalmers
Dave Price
Programming Lead
Ben Price
Programmers
Joseph Barber
Darren Foster
Art Lead
Mike Engstrom
Artists
Dominic Littler
Charlotte (Eva) Watson
Hajinalka Szanto
Aaron Humphreys
Animation Lead
Billy Allison
Animation
Ed Swain
Quality Assurance
Kieran Forrester
Audio
Allister Brimble