Icy Purple Head Superslide

How to play Icy Purple Head Superslide

One input, two states, and the whole game sits between them.

• Touch or click to become icy. Icy slides across any surface and keeps its speed.
• Release or switch to become purple. Purple sticks where it lands.
• Collect every checkpoint on the track.
• Reach the end of the run to finish the level.

What sticking is for

New players use purple as a brake and nothing else. It is more useful than that.

Sticking to a wall lets you fall from a chosen height rather than the one the track gave you. Sticking under a ledge lets you drop into a gap you would otherwise slide straight over. Sticking on a ceiling lets you wait for a moving obstacle to pass.

Every one of those is a way of choosing your entry speed into the next section, which is the only real control you have.

Checkpoints

They are placed slightly off the natural line on purpose. The route that carries you smoothly to the end usually misses two or three of them, and the route that collects everything requires you to give up speed somewhere and rebuild it.

Tips and strategy

What sticking really buys you

Purple looks like a brake and that reading costs people most of their runs.

Its real function is choosing where you fall from. A block that sticks to a wall halfway up drops from that height. A block that slides past and sticks at the bottom drops from nothing. Same surfaces, completely different speed into the next section.

Once you see purple as a way of setting your entry speed rather than stopping, the awkward checkpoints stop being awkward. The one you keep sailing past is not asking you to be more precise, it is asking you to arrive slower, and the only way to arrive slower is to have stuck somewhere higher up.

Plan in segments

Do not try to hold the whole track in your head. Break it into the stretch between one checkpoint and the next and solve each stretch as its own problem.

Once a segment works reliably, stop thinking about it and move your attention forward. Runs fall apart at the section you have not practised, not the one you have.

Speed you do not need is speed that hurts

Momentum feels like the point of the game and it is also what overshoots the checkpoint.

Before a tight collection, ask whether you want to arrive fast or slow. Often the correct move is to stick early, lose the speed deliberately, and drop onto the checkpoint from a standstill.

Where runs are lost

• Sticking on contact rather than just before it. The state change is not instant.
• Chasing a missed checkpoint by reversing. There is no reversing. Restart the segment.
• Holding icy through a section that has a ceiling. You will simply travel along it and past everything.
• Treating slopes as scenery. Every slope in the game is placed to give or take speed.

Getting a clean run

• Learn where the checkpoints are before trying to be smooth.
• Then find the switch points that collect them.
• Then remove the switches you do not need.
• Only then worry about doing it quickly.

That order matters. Trying to be fast before the route is settled produces attempts that fail differently every time, which teaches you nothing.

Learning a track

The first run through any level should be reconnaissance, not an attempt. Go through slowly, let the block fall where it wants, and note where the checkpoints sit relative to the natural line.

The second run is where you decide the switch points. The third is where you find out which of them were wrong.

Most players skip straight to the fourth run, trying to be smooth before they know the route, and then wonder why every attempt fails somewhere different. A route you have not decided is not a route, it is a series of reactions, and reactions are not fast enough for a track built on momentum.

Related

Icy Purple Head 3 is the parcel delivery version with rooms instead of a track, and it is the better starting point if this one feels unforgiving. Both sit in skill, and puzzle has the slower things to do with the same instinct.