Scarlet Skips Is A Small Jump Roping Roguelike That Isn't As Great on Steam Deck As Expected

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There are an insane number of games released each month now, and it doesn’t seem to be slowing down. Because of that, there have been a lot of weird, random games that have come across my feed. One such game is Scarlet Skips, a roguelike all about jump roping. As someone who loves these types of games, I was curious. So, I decided to try out the game for myself and see if it has earned that Verified badge.

As a game, it’s quite simple. We just press A to jump over the rope at the right time, and as we do, we progressively get more upgrades to try to hit the highest score. These can include adding more jump ropes, setting them on fire for multipliers, getting rocket boots, increasing our luck, and more. For $5, I didn’t expect anything too in-depth, but it was more engaging than I expected.

But what really surprised me is the visual quality and animations. Developer Yerk Games made Scarlet Skips in Unreal Engine, and they pulled out all the stops for the visuals and animations, which shows. Part of the fun is actually watching how Scarlet reacts and moves, and with the beautiful surroundings, it was quite pleasing to look at and watch.

However, this also works against it when it comes to performance. For such a simple premise, it’s incredibly demanding. Yes, the visuals look great, but we are just standing in one place, and it’s surprising that the game won’t hit 60 FPS no matter what. On the low settings, it will go to 49 FPS, while Medium sits at 37. High Quality dips below 30 FPS, sitting at around 23-24, so I don’t recommend it.

In this case, there are really two ways to play. We could go to Low settings with a 40 FPS cap or Medium with a 30 FPS cap. Personally, I would choose Medium because it looks significantly better with less obvious downgrades and reduced sharpness. Playing at a smoother framerate is nice, but it doesn’t feel as good as I had hoped.

Ultimately, I was quite disappointed with the performance. I would have expected more than 30 FPS because of the limited visuals and only looking at one specific spot, but that's what we get with all of the Unreal Engine features being used. It's still decently playable with those in mind, and it can be fun, but it feels like it should be a better experience on the Deck.

Scarlet Skips is $4.99 on Steam.

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