Cranked Up

Cranked Up is a platformer built around one of the stranger premises you will find on Steam: rocket-powered donuts on a mission to stop an evil pizza from ending the world. BBlack Studio made this, apparently by themselves, and that handmade quality shows in every corner of the game. The controls lean into the rocket gimmick, so movement is fast, a little chaotic, and deliberately hard to master. You are not meant to feel graceful. You are meant to feel like a pastry with too much thrust and too little time. The challenge curve is real. Cranked Up is not a breezy Saturday afternoon game. The levels demand precision and ask you to internalize the rocket-donut physics before the difficulty starts layering on top of you. Players who bounce off hard platformers quickly will probably bounce here too, and that is fair to acknowledge. But players who enjoy the loop of failing, learning a section, and finally threading it cleanly will find something genuinely satisfying in the way the mechanics build on themselves. The rocket movement has a small repertoire but BBlack Studio gets a surprising amount of mileage out of it. Visually the game is cheerful and low-fi in a way that feels intentional rather than rushed. The aesthetic matches the tone: bright, slightly unhinged, not taking itself seriously for a single second. The soundtrack carries that same energy, which matters in a platformer because you will be hearing the same music across many repeated attempts. To the studio's credit, it holds up. The audio design does not feel like an afterthought, which is something you notice more when it is absent. At roughly a hundred reviews the game sits at a perfect positive rating, which is a small but telling signal. People who found this game mostly found it worth finishing and saying something kind about. It is a short experience, and that is exactly right for what it is. A bloated version of Cranked Up would be a worse version of Cranked Up. The studio understood their scope and stayed inside it. If you are looking for a polished AAA platformer with tight onboarding and hand-holding checkpoints, this is not that. If you are looking for something weird, handcrafted, and committed to its own ridiculous logic, BBlack Studio built something here worth a few hours of your time.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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