So, X – or at least the feed served up to me by the Almighty Algorithm – has been buzzing about a very silly “jump rope roguelike” called Scarlet Skips recently. I think that’s partially because the concept of a game based around jumping rope is very silly and partially because it looks like it was developed by someone who has somewhat impure thoughts about Princess Daisy and decided to express them in the form of a game featuring a legally-distinct version of said princess.

To be clear, I can’t entirely fault them.  I would consider Daisy the superior princess as well, though that may mostly be from learning most of my Mario lore from the 1993 live-action Super Mario Brothers movie.

But I digress.

Anyway, when I went to Steam to look this thing up to see if it there was a trailer, this is what I got just from clicking into the Search field:

Note that I hadn’t typed a single character and it was still at the top of the list of popular searches.  I suspect the author is currently enjoying a certain degree of financial success.

It doesn’t have a Mac version, but I use Crossover to run Windows-only Steam games on my MacBook.  I wouldn’t say outright that this betrays a certain masochistic streak, but I wouldn’t fault you for inferring this was the case, because when I ran the thing I got a very vexing error that I’m pretty sure would not have come up if I were running it under Windows as it was designed to:

For Google’s sake, I’ll just reproduce the text from that error message below:

The Following component(s) are required to run this program:

Microsoft Visual C++ 2015-2022 Redistributable (x64)

Now, Crossover lets me install the Visual C++ Redistributable into its bottles as needed, and I was pretty sure I didn’t need to but tried anyway.  That failed with an error saying that a newer version was already installed, which was no shock.

It turns out that certain Unreal Engine games do a check for dependencies when they launch, and they check for the presence of the redistributable files in a way that won’t work on Crossover.

The solution is to change the launch options in Steam to launch a different executable.  This may apply to other Unreal Engine games, so this may be helpful in the future as well.

This is the actual game executable, rather than the stub that Steam launches that does the dependency checks.  So if you legitimately are missing a dependency, then running this directly may turn out very poorly.

Also Steam seems to have trouble realizing that you’re running the game, so you may not get playtime tracking or achievements at first.

Nonetheless, it runs, and creating a file called “steam_appid.txt” containing the game’s app ID in the same directory as the ScarletSkips-Win64-Shipping.exe file seems to get playtime and achievement attribution working.  That app ID is 4513480, by the way.

There’s not much there once you do get it running, to be honest.  Scarlet – I assume her name is Scarlet, based on the title – is shown as someone having a really bad time of things in life until she notices an award she received in her younger years for jumping rope and sets off to the nearest park, rope in hand, to recapture the fires of her youth.

and it’s cute!  You stand in the little patch of bare ground in the park and press a button to jump. Birds fly around. There are cars passing by on the road in the background.  Scarlet bounces.  After enough successful jumps, you level up and can pick from a selection of power ups.

After enough of these, you start to straight-up defy the laws of physics with regards to how high humans can actually jump.  “Ignite Jump Rope” gives you flaming jump ropes, doubling your score but with certain risks, and there’s also an option to reinforce your rope (or ropes, plural) so a single misstep won’t end your game.

I’m told there’s an ending once you get high enough, but I don’t think I’m good enough to see it.  I have gotten to see a variety of failure animations, though, and those are almost worth the price of admission by themselves.

While your normal “game over” state is just a faceplant, you get a rather more shocking one if you have a mishap with a flaming jump rope.

I also loved the animation if you miss a jump but are saved by your reinforced rope.  Scarlet does a somewhat exaggerated looking around as if to check whether anyone saw that before continuing.

And that, barring the ending that I haven’t seen, is all there is to the game.  There’s very little there but it really does push the “wait, one more try” button in the back of the brain very well.

Oh, and I learned something about Crossover.  That’s really the value I take from the experience.