Tricky Madness makes the trick the throttle

It is an arcade snowboarding game in the SSX and 1080 line, and the verbs are the familiar ones — spins, flips, grabs, grinds, and the landing that decides whether any of it counted. What is unusual is what those verbs are wired to. Scoring points from tricks and grinding fills a boost level, and when you land, that level cashes out as a burst of speed for a limited time. Speed is not a pickup on the mountain or a stat on a board. It is the receipt for the last thing you did in the air.

That inverts the usual order. In most downhill games you are already fast, and the game pays you points for styling on the way down; the tricks are decoration on a run that would have happened anyway. Here the run stops being fast the moment you stop styling. Frequent tricking is the throttle, which means the best line down a slope is not the shortest one — it is the one with enough lips, rails and rollers on it to keep the meter fed all the way to the bottom.

Sitting on top of that is the Freaky meter, filled by spins, flips, grabs and grinds until you can unleash Wicked Tricks and Wicked Grinds. The Superman, the Worm, the Butt Slide Grind: the big-score moves are gated behind having already been doing well, which is the same idea again one layer up.

The part worth the most attention is the combo bank. Chaining tricks scores more the more of them you strung together, and the extra points a combo earns are held in a separate counter rather than added to your total. Stop the combo and you cash them in. Wipe out and they are gone, all of them. Every additional trick you reach for is a bet placed with money you are already holding, and the developer is right to call managing that the thing you actually have to master.

How Games Use Feedback Loops argues that positive and negative loops are what decide whether a lead snowballs or a bad start spirals. Tricky Madness is a positive loop by construction: tricks give boost, boost gives speed, speed gives bigger air, bigger air gives more tricks. Loops like that are thrilling and they are dangerous, because the same slope keeps handing a good run more and a struggling run less. What keeps this one honest is that the loop passes through a skill check on every single landing rather than through a number that has already been decided.

How Game Designers Protect Players From Themselves makes the point that given a safe, reliable route to victory, players will take it even when that route flattens the game — so the job is to make the exciting route the attractive one. The separate combo counter is precisely that mechanism, and it does the work without a rule. Banking early is allowed, sensible, and nothing stops you; it also caps your score somewhere well below what the level can pay. The game never forbids the boring line. It just prices it, and lets you watch the number you walked away from.

The campaign is set on an open-world mountain with secrets and collectibles, and What to build first in an open world is the right frame for that half. The argument there is that the first thing to get right is a hundred metres of ground you enjoy crossing, because everything else in an open world is built on top of the crossing. A snowboarding mountain starts with an advantage — the traversal is the game — but it raises the bar too, because a collectible is only worth placing on terrain that is already fun to be on with nothing to collect.

Tricky Madness is by [Nathan Dearth](https://trickymadness.com/), self-published, out in Early Access on Windows, Mac and Linux since 15 November 2024. It is filed under Racing, Simulation and Sports. Single-player, with full controller support including DualShock and DualSense — which is not a footnote in a game whose entire vocabulary is stick directions held against shoulder buttons.

The rest of the promise is content rather than system: eight handcrafted levels, each with its own hidden surprises, a dedicated campaign on the open mountain, eight fully voiced characters with backstories and visual styles of their own, and a voiced in-game DJ commentating your run. The DJ is easy to read as garnish and is not one. In a scoring game the voice that reacts when a trick lands well is a feedback channel, and feedback is how anybody learns which of the things they did was the good one.

Three platforms from a solo developer is the other detail worth noting. Mac and Linux builds are usually the first thing to fall off a one-person project, and shipping all three says something about how the game was put together.

If the appeal is a chain of tricks that one mistake ends, Kick is the sibling here — the walk to school played as a single long soccer trick, where the whole score is the ball surviving the commute.